Christopher Benson’s exhibition at EVOKE Contemporary in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is called The Middle Place. He describes his paintings as falling into four realms, expressive realism and hard-edge realism, expressive abstraction and hard-edge abstraction. “I’ve been looking for the central point of all of them,” he says. “I’ve always thought of my paintings in some way as abstract. I don’t literally transcribe what I see. When I see something, I extrapolate a very distilled impression of it. I take a lot of stuff out. I make it look interesting on canvas.”
Red White and Blue Collage #8, oil on linen samples pieced on panel, 8 x 8"
Whether in a 4-foot square painting of crashing waves or in an 8-by-10-inch sketch of the nearby Galisteo Basin, Benson’s paintings are a symphony of energetic brushstrokes celebrating the material and drawing attention to the surface in the manner of the abstract expressionists, despite their real subjects. “The thing I love is the paint,” he explains. “And I like the surface in both the realism and the abstraction. If I begin to become formulaic, I back away and come back with a new vocabulary, a new eye and a new voice. I’m constantly experimenting.
Red White and Blue Collage #3, oil on linen samples pieced on panel, 11 x 14"
“Everybody I love made some bad paintings,” he continues. “George Bellows had an extraordinary moment at the beginning of his career. Then he backed away and became somewhat stilted. Bellows is somebody I respond to on a visceral level. He painted from his gut. He painted it out of his head. I see stuff, draw it, take some photos, but, largely, I make it up from an intuitive internal visual compendium as opposed to rendering a reference.”
Red White and Blue Collage #2, oil on linen samples pieced on panel, 12 x 9"
Benson adds, “That appeals to me in an age that’s so photographically attuned. What we’re seeing today are incredibly literal and narrative representations of the world. I like the sloppiness and messiness of the internal high. I like that we don’t quite know what we’re looking at. It’s like dreams. This stuff that’s inside our heads which is imperfect and human.”
Red White and Blue Collage #1, oil on linen samples pieced on panel, 12 x 12"
Benson invites the viewer to enter the paintings “and figure out what you think. I don’t want to tell you what to think.”
In the exhibition at EVOKE, which opens November 26 and continues through January 22, there are also collages of old abstract paintings he has cut up and glued to panels. Inspired by landscapes, they provoke the viewer to contemplate natural and built landscapes as well as paint and surface, probing with the intellect and feeling in the gut. —
EVOKE Contemporary
550 S. Guadalupe Street • Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 995-9902 • www.evokecontemporary.com
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