Benjamin Grant
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Untitled
Acrylic on canvas
30" x 40"

In my most recent body of work I have taken a process-based means of production as a conceptual starting point for the creation of my paintings. Through the use of a variety of photographic, cultural and art historical references, I have attempted to marry images with divergent origins, but often thematically similar subject matter, by outputting them in a range of different painting techniques. As I process these images, they lose much of their original visual identity and are translated into a mark making system that, while functioning on a largely formal level, retains an echo of its image origin. The slight hint of recognition that comes with what might otherwise appear to be an element of abstraction is a tool that I use to make my paintings straddle the line between representation and abstraction. By giving the viewer great latitude in their associational and interpretational reactions, I hope to nudge them rather than force them into a relationship with each work.

The images I use in my painting range from aerial photographs of the Jonestown Massacre to paintings by Gericault and Goya. By incorporating these disparate images in my paintings I am not attempting to draw specific correlations between them but rather I am using their visual and thematic relationships, ones that are often quite literal, as a jumping off point for formal exploration. The cultural and historical significance of classical paintings and documentary evidence of mass suicide are wildly divergent, but the visual rhyme of their compositions and vague intertwining of their subject matter let me use them together as a device for mark making. By using images of such an iconic nature, ones that share violent and dark subject matter, and ones that might otherwise be overtly disturbing, I hope to put forth images that are masked by the veil of abstraction and become painting elements that do not confront the viewer with their nature, but, resonate as slightly ominous backdrops for the interplay of formal explorations.

I try to compose my paintings out of clearly separate elements and combine them in a picture space that allows me to interchange them from painting to painting. What was once a foreground arc made of parallel lines will in a subsequent painting be a foreground arc made of opaque looping lines. By giving myself the ability to rearrange elements within a loose framework of compositions, I feel that I can explore the relationships among formal elements and show the open-endedness of the painting process as an end unto itself. In the future I hope to use the compositional framework and language of image and non-image based mark making that I have created to explore in greater detail the possibilities of picture making.