Erik Benson

2005, If You Lived Here, acrylic and canvas on wood panel, 60 x 72”

2004, Staying Up All Night, acrylic and canvas on wood panel, 40 x 72”

Benson uses a method of collage-as-painting: painstakingly made by first applying acrylic paint to glass, and, once dry, cutting and affixing it to canvas. Benson’s paintings of corporate office towers, strip-malls and graffiti-scarred highway barriers appear at once as delicately balanced, nearly abstract compositions of geometric color, and also as particularly beautiful condensations of highly poetic loneliness. Benson’s views of the most ordinary of 21st Century landscapes distill, like most great art, a uniquely important measure of mystery and power from exactly those vistas that remain unexamined.