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Leon Benn

I do not consider my work didactic, but rather, I strive towards a re-thinking of the idea of the romantic and sublime within painting. After my time at the Rhode Island School of Design, a year of which was spent painting and studying art history in Rome, I worked in a commercial mural painting studio in New York City. The majority of the projects in the studio were comprised of painting in a style of highly embellished realism, at times reminiscent of Nicolas Poussin, Fragonard, Bouguereau and the Hudson River school painters, like Frederick Church. Despite the often oppressive commitment to repetitive, monotonous depiction of symbols and forms that were fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries, many classical painting techniques were, over time, imported into my studio practice. Almost an act of rebellion against the long past Fragonard regime, and the nouveau-riche client base that re-embraced these motifs, I chose to paint dark, sloppy, obscure natural forms, at odds with the sugar coated products of the mural studio, yet still attempting to engage with the history of technique and illusion in painting. I aim to alter the landscape tradition into a bizarre junk pile, at times monumental and romantic and at others banal and abject. Layer after layer of glazes, a swimming hole, a portrait, a firestorm take shape, echoing a post modern flux of ideas and images. Within these images ambiguous organic forms, at times closely resembling slime mold and fungi, elements that bring to mind decomposition and decay merge with waterfront condos, sand or mango colored furniture that sits below a computer generated silhouette of trees and birds.

The sublime, according to Immanuel Kant, is in the mind, not the object. It is a walk in the wilderness at night, the loss of vision, the finding of an unexpected place that is both frightening and cathartic. My paintings attempt to recover this place. They emerge from the paradox of our contemporary relationship to nature. Instability and rupture mark the relationship between nature and society. The more connected one is to nature, the more terrible is its intensity. The more removed, the less we feel. I take inspiration from the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s commitment to exploring this paradox. Most often the point of departure in my work is a landscape. I strive to create a space of organized and violent chaos in which the natural landscape is the subject, the figure – the protagonist.

Leon Benn CV



Mountain
2009, 32" x 28", Oil on canvas.



Personal Space
2009, 7.5" x 9", Acrylic on paper.



Robinson Crusoe
2008, 37" x 36", Oil on canvas.



The Owls
2009, 32" x 28", Oil on canvas.