Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Benjamin Klein. These new works broaden the visual language and philosophical nature of Klein’s practice. As the artist writes:
My paintings depict a vivid, dreamlike night world, uncertain and relativistic in the fabric of its imaginary reality. In landscapes of liminal phantasmagoria – as well as between what we often differentiate as “figuration” and “abstraction” – I create believable illusions at the same time as disrupting them, to distinguish as well as to collide a broad range of interpretive possibilities. I paint along diverging and aggregating visual directions, adding and subtracting, planning beforehand but also playing with accidents and accretions; in effect experimenting as an artistic strategy in order to arrive at the richest possible pictorial result. Possible narratives exist in the work, as well as poetic, fabulist or parable-like fragments of textuality, in scenes that baffle any definite storyline, and resist being reduced to over-determined strategies or stylistic procedure, whether formal or conceptual. Potentially allegorical and engaged with symbolic and semiotic possibilities, these paintings nevertheless embody and express natural and possibly illogical/irrational emotional states. They carry the urgency and strangeness of dreaming, but they are not about dreams or visions, they are like them. When a painting is finished, it is because I can’t permit any more paradox or chaos to exist within it without destroying the particular and nuanced world I have created. Likewise emotionally, I charge the atmosphere of my work to the limit of its capacity, while editing and avoiding sentimentality and predictable use of cliché.
In the most recent work, dislocations of space and perspective have become more pronounced, the cast of characters broader and more allusive, and the atmosphere more animistic and otherworldly. Previously the work was concerned to remain at least a potential representation of our world, but now has become something else. Freed to represent a magical, oneiric ecosystem, it has become an image of representation itself – which may or may not philosophically be the same as reality in the full sense. I have engaged with the notion of the afterlife or the spirit world; not the actual existent one (if it does exist) as we imagine it along cultural or personal lines, but a realized metaphor for it. To the extent that there is a difference between such a metaphor and such a reality, I paint a place where the mind or the soul, which themselves can be seen as metaphors to begin with, are the figures for which their content becomes the ground.
I want to catch – not capture, but catch – the moment/place when and where reality and fiction unravel and combine, when reality and unreality become and are the same thing, where the rules bend and finally break – a landscape that generates the uncanny sense that the viewer is both there, and has been there before – even though it is not a realistically possible place or occurrence. The characters I depict are like the paintings they inhabit – the paintings themselves are the major characters, and all the things depicted within can be seen as figures, i.e. trees, flowers and clouds are just as potentially “alive” as tortoises, cows, or bunnies. The whole painting is asked/made to function as an “eye” that sees the viewer metaphorically just as the viewer literally sees the painting, much like a dramatic character that breaches the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience.
What excites me the most about hand painting in oils on conventional canvases is the radical epistemological possibility that the so-called “window”, “into” which we “look” can be so activated as to bring into ontological question the status of physical objects as “real” (including our bodies, brains and sensory organs, and so our consciousness of existence and perception in the first place): it is reaching and (conceptually) breaching this empirical limit of our understanding that activates the content of my painting and drives its aesthetic meaning. Existence and existent fictions, and the consciousness of them may or may not be the same; a painting has to be aware of that and to make us aware of it. In a sense each painting returns to the origin point of creativity, aesthetics per se: the creation from nothing. The paradox is that only by psychologically acknowledging this epistemology can fact be distinguished from fiction – a process that in our time has taken on a primal, radical necessity.
- BK
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Benjamin Kleinwas born in Chicago and grew up in Montreal. Klein's landscape paintings depict a colourful, shadowy, and ambiguous nocturnal world of uncertain proportions and materiality. Shifting constantly in psychological as well as physical dimensions, his world is populated by anthropomorphized, animal-like characters that interact and metamorphose in fragmented scenes, fraught with semiotic and symbolic potential. He holds a BFA from Concordia University in Studio Arts, and an MFA from the University of Guelph. In 2010 he was a finalist in the RBC's National Painting Competition. He has exhibited across Canada, in the USA, the UK and Germany.