Ben Reeves: Smoke, Cars, Flowers

Car and Petals, 2007 Ben Reeves Oil on canvas over panel 48 x 60 inches, 1.22 x 1.52 meters	Smoker 3 (girl smoker), 2007 Ben Reeves Oil on linen 30 x 36 inches, 76 x 91.5 cm

“In my work I am ruminating on how representations are internalized, then projected outwards — mapped onto the world. I am interested in how representation alters and shapes our physical experience and perception of reality. That painting operates as both image and substance parallels this understanding. Painting has a mediated and an immediate aspect. Its otherwise insubstantial images are bodied forth with an inexorable physicality. My paintings accentuate this duality with moments where thick paint insists on its materiality—challenging the illusionism of the picture, even as it is integral to it”.

Ben Reeves’ recent paintings address common subject matter that embodies flux, such as smoke and falling blossoms. In his Smokers series, the breath is made visible and in his Magnolias and Petals series the banal world undergoes a fleeting hallucinogenic transformation as pink blossoms float like snowflakes and carpet the urban landscape. Reeves’ heavy brush strokes and daubs of paint accentuate the tangible, object-ness of painting, at the same time reasserting the image as no more than a representation. Similarly, in his drawings Reeves takes apart the brush stokes which constitute a painted image, painstakingly drawing each liquid gesture with paradoxical precision until the resultant image becomes both a dense abstraction and a distilled mapping of the process of representation.

Artists:
Ben Reeves