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CHRISTOPHER BENSONW I T H H E L D N A R R A T I V E S

cover: Truchas #1, 2014 oil on linen, 54” x 64”

Railyard Arts District | Paseo de Peralta | tel 505.988.3250 | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | www.lewallengalleries.com

CHRISTOPHER BENSONW I T H H E L D N A R R A T I V E S

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I was born in New England in 1960 and grew up in the orbit of the Rhode Island School of Design where my parents were both undergraduates and where my grandfather had taught in the 1940s. Any painter who came up in those postwar decades has lived through one of the most complex, challenging ages of American art; a period marked throughout by constant innovations of style, theory and posturing. Despite that shifting terrain, I fastened early on to a kind of modernist-inflected representation that made sense to me, and to which I have stubbornly stuck ever since. This preference dates to the first major painting exhibition I ever attended when my mother, a lapsed painter herself, took me at age 16 to see Richard Diebenkorn’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. By then I had been working in oils for four years, with the expectation that I would take up a career as a book illustrator. In the winter after that trip, I began studying with a modernist painter (Peter Devine, whose essay is also published here). By the following spring, the lingering influence of the Diebenkorn show and Peter’s instruction together diverted me away from illustration and set me once and for all on the track to a painter’s life.

What struck me when at the show in New York, and was reinforced in my subsequent studies, was how antithetical to illustration modern painting could be. The marriage of expressionistic abstraction with figuration in the most mundane domestic subjects is now such a clichéd stylistic device that it’s easy to overlook how that approach changed the way we look at and experience paintings. Diebenkorn didn’t invent this method, it was just an extension of the revolution the Impressionists and Post Impressionists had started a century earlier. But he brought something new to it that had a huge impact on me: his surfaces were raw, and more implicitly abstract than the prettier styles of the Impressionists. This made his modernism more clearly distinct to me as a young painter. In the years that followed, I became a student of the whole lineage of modernists who painted in this way, from Cezanne, Matisse, Bonnard and Morandi in Europe, to Americans like David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Fairfield Porter.

The common thread in that tradition that has driven my own efforts since I first noticed it is its integration of surface and form with nonnarrative pictorial content. As full-on abstraction was taking hold through the twentieth century, all the artists noted above continued to make pictures, while yet abandoning the illustrative hierarchies and stylistic embellishments that defined representation before them. In that sense, they were abstracting the narrative alongside the picture itself. The Modern painters didn’t tell stories in the way that a Delacroix or Gericault would have done. Instead, by couching their pictorial tableaux in a painterly distillation of shapes and surfaces—and preserving just enough of the

familiar to invite the viewer into the work—they enable us to build our own narratives from it that are potentially more direct and truthful than any tale told by a distant author. The object of the painting itself thus became more real than any story (including that of the artist’s representational virtuosity) on which it might otherwise depend to impress or excite the viewer’s admiration. And like the viewer, the painter was also left to discover some inherent truth revealed by the work itself, rather than projected onto it by any predetermined narrative.

That capacity to enable a subjective experience in both maker and viewer also sets modern representation apart from the postmodern conceptualism that followed it. Like the academic tradition against which the Modernists originally rebelled in the 1870s, the Postmodernists cycled back a century later to a similarly academic project. Once again we find ourselves in an age where the artists’ purpose is not to discover meaning through their work, but to manufacture it conceptually ahead of that process and then use the work to illustrate it.

Despite the supposed advancements that have shaped art throughout most of my career since the early 1980s, I still find modern representation to be among the subtlest, most advanced, most free and progressive innovations ever achieved in painting. That belief is reinforced by the fact that many of the greatest painters from the long historical path leading to Modernism evolved to something quite similar after long careers making more conventionally narrative forms of art. The late works of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Turner and Goya all especially come to mind. But whatever high-minded rationalizations I might concoct for my method, the simpler truth is that I make paintings like this myself because they are the kind I like most to look at.

Christopher Benson

CHRISTOPHER BENSON W I T H H E L D N A R R A T I V E S

Black Mesa #5, 2012, oil on panel, 18” x 24”

Artist Statement

Tintagtel Castle Ruin, 2014, oil on linen, 16” x 19.75”

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In Christopher Benson’s painting, color is close to the pure force Mondrian made possible. The clear representation of the scenes he depicts invites a realist reading; but the paintings’ constructed organization—and the odd angles viewed—belie that interpretation and instead suggest artifice. Perception and artifice thus simultaneously claim to be the truth. At first we look and think we know the subject, then look again to realize it is a fabrication. He uses color in its abstract role as the foundation of form, yet also as the distilled, resonant color of remembered objects.

The subjects of Benson’s pictures are ostensibly the alleys and vacant parking lots of seemingly inactive manufacturing buildings, or the quiet, sometimes peopled, interiors of suburban households. Despite their familiarity, we come to know little of these realms or their inhabitants. Instead, the severity of the modern aesthetic, having eliminated the decorative filigree of its predecessors becomes the ordering principle of the contemporary physical world. The Modernists’ idea has become tangible in the world that followed them. He reclaims that idea in its applied permutations and has it both ways by painting the real and the abstract together.

Benson did not arrive at this point in a flash. From his early narrative paintings of New England, New York City and the suburbs of San Francisco, to his later, more purely planar abstractions, there was a tension between his interests. The obvious appeal of Edward Hopper, among others, pervades much of the early work. He looks to the same sorts of places Hopper did for his subject matter. But where Benson differs is in having unbuckled the narrative from the image. We love to read a Hopper painting cinematically, as if it were a frame from Hitchcock. Both Hitchcock and Hopper depicted pregnant moments that filled us with anticipation and veiled portent. Benson withholds such narrative cues, building scenes in which each patch of color is applied with the same emotional pitch. Possibly forlorn buildings are depicted evenly with no special touch distinguishing them from sky or ground. Oh, he’s clever; long walls of industrial plants are fenestrated with an impossibly small window, but there is never a tendentious touch proclaiming that these are poetic proportions. There is only the dry, quiet power of beautifully applied paint. It is in fact the very absence of the didactic that causes one to linger before each canvas: Their resonance resides in their taciturn presence.

Rebecca West once asserted that conversation is an illusion—that in reality there are only intersecting monologues. In a world of ever more bombastic exchange, there is a timeless peace to be found in these carefully considered paintings. Benson’s acute sense of the history of his kind of picture making also ironically frees him from the most narrowly contextualizing constraints of the past art-historical movements through which it evolved. He knows where he came from and comfortably

finds his own voice without disavowing the many diverse lineages that made it possible. This is clear in a range of recognizable influences from which he builds, rather than derives his worldview: The severity of his depictions can be reminiscent of Charles Sheeler’s earlier deadpan modernist realism, but he betrays an equal interest in Mondrian’s sparse abstraction, and carries forward both Cezanne and Morandi’s intention for painting to be a theater in which the perceived evokes the ideal. Perhaps even more to the point is Benson’s likeness to Piero della Francesca. Like Piero, he paints a world that exists outside of the tarnishing of time. And though his paintings possess a reverence for that world, they do not instruct us on how we should feel about it.

Peter Devine, New York, 2014

On the Work of Christopher Benson

4Roswell #7, 2014, oil on linen, 11” x 14”

Black Mesa 4, 2010, oil on linen, 46” x 58”5

6Tiverton Window, 2012, oil on linen, 44” x 56”

Interior with Sleeping Girl, 2014, oil on panel, 40” x 30”7

8Large Figure, 2010, oil on panel, 40” x 30”

Cordova Ruin, 2014, oil on linen, 54” x 34”9

Roswell #6, 2014, oil on linen, 24” x 36” 10

11Interior with Figures,

2012, oil on panel, 30” x 30”

Breaking Wave, Half Moon Bay, 2012, charcoal & oilstick on paper, 24” x 38” 12

Tiverton Window, 2012, charcoal on paper, 13.25” x 17”13

14Interior at Nick and Alix’s House, 2012, charcoal on paper, 22” x 17.75”

Cybele E. William Study, 1997, charcoal & oilstick on paper, 20.5” x 17.5”15

16Studio Still Life, 2014, charcoal & oilstick on paper, 22” x 30.25”

Figure in a Chair, 2011, charcoal on paper, 30.25” x 26”17

18Merideth, 2012, charcoal on paper, 13” x 10.5”

BornProvidence, RI, 1960

Education1979-1982 Rhode Island School of Design, Painting2004-2005 Rhode Island School of Design, BFA Painting

Grants/Fellowships2001-2002 Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Painting Fellowship

Selected Solo Exhibitions2014 LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2012 Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM2006 Suydam and Diepenbrok Gallery, Newport, RI2003 Tercera Gallery, San Francisco, CA2000 Tercera Gallery, San Francisco, CA1999 Tercera Gallery, Los Gatos, CA1997 Butters Gallery, Portland, OR1992 LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM

Selected group Exhibitions2014 Reimagining the Contemporary Landscape, LewAllen Galleries, Scottsdale, AZ2013 Dwellings, Paintings by Peri Schwartz, Christopher Benson and Tom Birkner, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM2013 ArtMarket San Francisco, Paul Thiebaud Gallery2011 San Francisco Fine Art Fair at Fort Mason Center2011 Face to Face, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM2010 Artist Perspectives, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

2010 Christopher Benson and Thayer Carter, The Fisher Press, Santa Fe, NM2008 The Printed Picture, MoMA, New York, NY2005 RISD Senior Invitational Exhibition, Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RI2003 Christopher Benson and John Beerman, Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI2003 Annual Juried Show, Newport Art Museum,Newport, RI2001 The Bensons of Newport, Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI1999 Grand Opening exhibition, Tercera Gallery, San Francisco, CA2000 Contemporary American Painting, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM1992 167th Annual Juried Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York, NY1989 Featured Artist, LewAllen-Butler Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

CollectionsStanford University Libraries, Special Collections, Stanford, CAMuseum of Modern Art, New York, NYNewport Art Museum, Newport, RIRedwood Library and Athenaeum, Newport, RIRhode Island School of Design Special CollectionsLibrary,Providence, RIStanford Law School, Stanford University, Stanford, CASchool of Aeronautics and Aviation, Stanford University, Stanford

Christopher Benson

Roswell #5, 2013, oil on linen, 10” x 20”

CA

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | tel 505.988.3250 Santa Fe, New Mexio 87501 | www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com