Erik Benson in Vanity Fair in Spain
February 2012Download as PDF (279 K)
Erik Benson Detouring at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, Gallery Guide
October 2011Erik Benson will have a solo exhibition of new paintings at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, L.L.C. from September 22nd until October 21st, 2011. Benson's recent work has drawn the attention of the art media and major collectors. After highly successful sales at Art Basel Miami Beach and the Armory show, there is already a waiting list for works from the new exhibition.Download as PDF (3 MB)
Erik Benson Detouring at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, Greg Lindquist/ ArtNews
December 2011Erik Benson's exquisite show "Detouring" reassembled and animated urban blight. With layered slivers and strips of collaged acrylic paint, Benson creates vista of his Bushwick, Brooklyn, neighborhood. His recent works, shown here, tend to be grimier than past efforts and somewhat atmospheric as a result of the artist's direct painting on canvas (whether by hand or sprayer). Yet while displaying wear on the surfaces, the paintings also retain the graphic precision of the previous work.Download as PDF (1.4 MB)
Planet of Slums
March 2011Review of the exhibition Planet of Slums held at Third Streaming in New York from December 17, 2010- February 5, 2011. Erik's painting, "Brownfield (Site)" was included in the exhibition.Download as PDF (2.1 MB)
Erik Benson in, Future Tense: Landscape in Transition
April 4, 2010Future Tense presents work by twenty one artists who are taking a critical look at issues concerning the state of the environment - from land use, air quality, pollution and consumption of fossil fuels to natural and/or manmade disasters. The exhibition investigates a range of post-Utopian worldviews in art that utilizes the landscape, in part, as the theater of human action.
Concerned with the environmental changes and dystopia encompassing experiments in the mid-twentieth century and a more recent constellation of factors that have caused global change, artists articulate their point of view in forms including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and installation. While some artists deal with questions of past socio-political events, others forecast the future and at times indicate solutions for alternative, potentially sustainable conditions for human life. Some present sobering information from current, true-life events, while others spin fictional narratives or biting satire. All seem to indicate a moral imperative to look for solutions that will better affect the future of people and places.
Several artists in Future Tense continue to utilize the traditional horizon line and long view, however, their agendas veer strongly away from historic landscape, which also includes European Romanticism and the Sublime, to focus on recent environmental shifts that assert tension inherent to growth and spiritual decline intrinsic to rapid periods of global industrial expansion. Each artist takes a position along the road from cautious hope to utter disenchantment, generating work that expresses complex political and social dimensions of landscape, architecture, science and technologies.Download as PDF (240 K)
Erik Benson at Finesilver Houston, ARTnews
November 2007Erik Benson presents a persuasive, dystopian take on the American landscape. In his paintings on canvas and paper, the normalcy of suburban views dominated by edifices of glass and steel is rudely interrupted - marked by decay or overwhelmed by ominous emissions suggestive of pollution or explosion.
The contrast between airbrushed ground and overlaid acrylic cutout lends Benson's landscapes a graphic punch. Painted on glass and cut loose with an X-Acto knife, the transfers are applied like decals. These sharp-edged silhouettes dominated by shades of brown, gray or green stand out from the backgrounds to create an effect that is both laconic and surprisingly graceful.
In many compositions the horizon is nowhere to be seen. Details are pushed to the edge, slung low to the ground, or hoisted to the top of the painting. What fills the center are voidlike smoke plumes or barrier walls. Americaland (2007) is a vignette of lost innocence, youth and exuberance. The composition is dominated by a looming, gridded retaining wall stained with organic ooze and graffiti tags. In Parking Lot Fields (2007), suggestions of prosaic suburban strip mall - seagulls, treetops, car-lot banner, flags, and light poles- are overwhelmed by an ominous spew of laterally drifting black smoke.
Benson's what-is-wrong-with-this-picture sensibility works best when the out-of-place is less noticeable. At first glance, with its wintry leafless trees and nondescript apartment building standing before a cloud-studded sky. Flight Patterns (2007) is a rose tinted study in late-afternoon harmony. Benson punctuates this reverie with a commercial jet that depending on how you read it, is either banking sharply or falling to the earth. CHRISTOPHER FRENCHDownload as PDF (197 K)
Erik Benson/Augusto Arbizo, The New Yorker Issue of 2006-10-09
October 9, 2006Erik Benson / Augusto Arbizo
One might venture to identify an emerging phenomenon among young painters, in which old-fashioned color-field abstraction merges with a dystopic , Pop-ish interest in the junky emptiness of highway on-ramps, strip malls, and corporate office parks. The idea stands or falls on the depth of engagement with the painted surface, and Benson is a good example of its success. His layered acrylic canvases start with splotches of paint laid onto glass; these are peeled up and collaged into works with a jigsawlike density, a gloomy/garish palette, and a keen sense of line. The compositions manage to express humor, loathing, and curiosity all at once.Download as PDF (184 K)
Erik Benson The Brooklyn Rail, Elsewhere at Roebling Hall
September 7-October 14, 2006Eric Benson's first New York solo exhibition offers seven elegantly crafted, exquisitely designed collage paintings of an imagined contemporary American landscape. The paintings, all from 2006, depict all-too-familiar urban sprawl fill of incongruously sited International Style glass skyscrapers, decaying forms that have outlived their usefulness, and ubiquitous cookie cutter housing developments on the frontier of suburbia.
Employing sharp-edged realism and a novel technique of collage-as-painting, these intensely crafted, low-relief images have affinities with Kara Walker's cutout silhouettes as well as anime. Benson painstakingly cuts a wide range of shapes, down to the smallest details, from prepared dried skeins of acrylic paint. He then attaches the decal-like pieces in layers to the surface of the canvas. In "Anniversary," brightly colored forms, applied in crisp modular units, represent an apartment complex under construction at the edge of a city. Benson achieves a remarkable verisimilitude when he chooses colors that directly relate to their real-life equivalents, such as construction pink and earth brown. But he occasionally departs into more expressive usage, as when he suggests equivalence between the building of the painting and the construction of a city by leaving the earth the same color as the canvas.
Benson's restrained palette reflects the cool, dispassionate atmosphere of the generic modernist glass box. He reminds us that modernist architecture began as a revolutionary movement with the intention of transforming society and reshaping the world, and that we now know this did not happen, especially for the buildings in these paintings, which tend to dominate their surroundings despite their isolation and apparent neglect.
In "Liars (Talking Skulls)," the once shiny symbols of modern, streamlined efficiency are now relics tinged with grime. A banal, graffiti-covered cement wall separates them from the foreground, which may or may not be a superhighway. Low-lying, soot-colored clouds suggest that the buildings are sitting in their own pile of pollution- apt symbols of the rifts between urban and landscape planning, architecture and the humans it was meant to serve.Download as PDF (224 K)
Erik Benson, Sinister Visions of the Suburbs
December 19, 2003The United States may not have invented the suburbs, but it sometimes seems that we've done more than anyone else to turn suburban living into an art. At Angles Gallery, four painters born in the 1970s depict the suburbs as strangely alienating places. In their pop-infected pictures, the comforts of home seem poisonous, suffused with the mutant beauty viewers have come to expect from art on the fringe of responsibility.
Todd Bouret's acrylics on canvas are the most conventional. All four are easy-to-read images of interiors and exteriors, both cluttered and barren. Two are artfully sullied with fugitive bits of synthetic ceiling texture. But Bourret's paint handling is too perfunctory to get beyond the obvious.
Erik Benson and Nikko Mueller take more distant views of apartment buildings, malls and country clubs. Both painters also take more chances with their palettes, compositions and paint handling. It pays off.
Benson literally builds his images of modernist high-rises brick by brick, gluing carefully cut-out rectangles of dried paint to his canvases as if her were making miniature mosaics. Mueller treats bird's-eye views of suburban subdivisions as skeletal structures for his own painterly adventures. Dribbling and plastering paint with controlled abandon, he draws viewers into worlds at once tidy and toxic.
Likewise, Liam Jones sticks to the surface of things to emphasize that reality is often stranger than fiction. His pictures of trailer homes, partially constructed houses and others tented from fumigation look like the bastard offspring for good ol' trompe l'oeil illusionism and up-to-the-minute computer graphics.
The muted queasiness that characterizes all their works re-calls the art of Georges Seurat, the first great painter of the suburbs. Like his Pointillist pictures of lower-middle class swimmers and upper-middle-class promenaders from the 1880's, these contemporary paintings make familiar things look strangely upsetting- all the better to get viewers to pay attention to our surroundings.Download as PDF (240 K)