Bio

Erik Benson

Statement
I am interested in painting in an analog, physical sense. I believe that the act of painting is a visual language that is the balance between thinking, seeing and making. I build my paintings employing processes of pouring acrylic paint onto sheets of glass. Once the shapes have solidified and acquired elasticity, they are peeled off and collaged into larger compositions. These collaged constructions create a certain mimetic relationship between the visual information depicted and the processes in which they are made. This process based painting practice allows for me to explore how ideas are observed and understood and how that transaction is processed into paint and image. 
Often in my work the imagery toggles between the object-ness of sculpture and the vast canon of painting’s visual vocabulary. There is also the tactility of the forms as they start as a two dimensional image and come off the glass into a physical object and back to a two dimensional surface. The paintings present themselves as landscape and still life hybrid tropes that are informed as much by architecture and fragments of urban landscape and culture as they are by unicorn birthday balloons and kid’s stickers. They attempt to deconstruct the hierarchy of high and low by scrying the familiar and creating new arrangements and contexts. They are about impossibly and impermanence. Precarious constructions made out of everyday items such as potted plants, toys, books and building materials, put together with sculptural antiquities that intervene into totemic, homemade, makeshift monuments of invention that speak to the fragile nature of our current moment of contemporary precarity. 
For me, painting has always been a place where observations and depictions can take on one’s interior ideas and thoughts of the day and make some kind of visual intelligence out of things that often make no sense. So much of the last few years has been about fragility and precariousness. As of lately, I paint my own reality, of being a Dad to two young daughters and husband of an artist in the middle of a Global pandemic, in the city that sparked a movement for racial equality, has many challenges but also moments of profound reflection. Watching the world change before our eyes for better and often worse has granted lessons from failures and roadmaps for future questions to be asked.