PARKPAINTINGS by Kristopher Benedict is a selection of recent paintings drawn from the artist’s continued involvement with ideas of constructed landscapes and growth within controlled systems. Made from images of public parks, these paintings are an investigation of the strategies of representation that drive both the creation of these landscapes and their counterparts in painting. They present the park, and the practice of painting, as a social space full of paradox; offering a relief from everyday life and a chance for leisure and sentimentality while underscoring issues of authority and control.
The paintings themselves are also paradoxical. They are romantic and rhetorical, challenging the viewer’s expectations. They appear both conventional and aggressive, refusing to disclose certain information and often disallowing the viewer’s entrance into an illusionistic space as it is traditionally conceived. There is a play between the painting’s image and it’s materiality. Piled layers of oily matter, poured puddles of enamel paint, and guileless gestures act as a foil to faux-impressionism and painting techniques found elsewhere in history. The painting’s image, the park scene, lies somewhere in between.
The parks of PARKPAINTINGS are showcases for antiquated ideals but are also records of the artist’s search inside that circumscribed space. They are willfully idiosyncratic, humorous, and emotional - painted to the point of collapse. There is a feeling in these paintings of an incoming storm, of an apocalypse in the wings. The paintings play with - sometimes tender and sometimes confrontational - the ideologies found in the public park as well as in painting history. Benedict places these hierarchies in a state of flux. One notices the differences in our contemporary understanding of space and how we use and aestheticize our landscape. PARKPAINTINGS is a critique of those spaces and ideologies and, at the same time, another dream about landscape painting.
Kristopher Benedict is a recent graduate of the Columbia Visual Arts MFA program and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Arts. This is his first solo show.