ArtSeen
Eric Benson
Elsewhere
Roebling Hall September 7–October 14, 2006

Eric 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 full 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.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 19381981
By Mary Ann CawsAPRIL 2021 | ArtSeen
Kasmins current exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and contains several masterpieces from the very debut of her collage paintings at the Stable Gallery in 1955.

Jan-Ole Schiemann: New Paintings
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightMAY 2023 | ArtSeen
In New Paintings at Kasmin Gallery, Jan-Ole Schiemann utilizes a segmented compositional structure to annotate different modes of mark marking. The artist makes extensive use of pastiche within the gaps of the picture plane, in a process that disconnects signs from the literalness of representation.
Peter Halley: Paintings and Drawings, 1980–81
By David WhelanJUNE 2023 | ArtSeen
The 1980s were formative years for Peter Halley, a New York artist best known for geometric paintings evoking prisons and cells, painted in florescent colors with industrial techniques. His dual shows currently on view at Karma and Craig Starr offer a privileged view into the artist's earlier experimental work.
Susan Bee: Apocalypses, Fables, and Reveries: New Paintings
By Irene Lyla LeeAPRIL 2023 | ArtSeen
Apocalypses, Fables, and Reveries: New Paintings, is Susan Bees tenth solo exhibit at A.I.R. Gallery, where she has long been a member of the legendary co-op. The show features pieces created between 20202023, when the apocalypse became all too vivid in a collective imagination that was enduring the COVID-19 pandemic.