Exhibition Checklist

Front room, counterclockwise from right, at window:

1. Exhibits (A) & (B) #1, 2014 Pigment, synthetic cellulose binder and ultraviolet-cured ink on paper; 11 ¾” x 8 ¼” - in integral frame o.d. 12” x 8 ½”
2. Exhibits (A) & (B) #5, 2014 Pigment, synthetic cellulose binder and ultraviolet-cured ink on paper; 11 ¾” x 8 ¼” - in integral frame o.d. 12” x 8 ½”
3. Exhibits (A) & (B) #7, 2014 Pigment, synthetic cellulose binder and ultraviolet-cured ink on paper; 11 ¾” x 8 ¼” - in integral frame o.d. 12” x 8 ½”
4. Exhibits (A) & (B) #2, 2014 Pigment, synthetic cellulose binder and ultraviolet-cured ink on paper; 11 ¾” x 8 ¼” - in integral frame o.d. 12” x 8 ½”
5. Exhibits (A) & (B) #6, 2014 Pigment, synthetic cellulose binder and ultraviolet-cured ink on paper; 11 ¾” x 8 ¼” - in integral frame o.d. 12” x 8 ½”
6. Graph [Blue] (#4), 2016 Watercolor on graph paper; 15 3/8” x 11 3/8”, (in integral artist-made aluminum frame o.d. 16” x 12”)
7. Graph [Blue] (#1), 2015 Watercolor on graph paper; 15 3/8” x 11 3/8”, (in integral artist-made aluminum frame o.d. 16” x 12”)
8. Graph [Blue] (#5), 2016 Watercolor on graph paper; 15 3/8” x 11 3/8”, (in integral artist-made aluminum frame o.d. 16” x 12”)
9. Graph [Red] (#2), 2015 Watercolor on graph paper; 15 3/8” x 11 3/8”, (in integral artist-made aluminum frame o.d. 16” x 12”)
10. Graph [Red] (#6), 2016 Watercolor on graph paper; 15 3/8” x 11 3/8”, (in integral artist-made aluminum frame o.d. 16” x 12”)
11. Graph [Red] (#7), 2016 Watercolor on graph paper; 15 3/8” x 11 3/8”, (in integral artist-made aluminum frame o.d. 16” x 12”)
12. Graph [Red] (#3), 2015 Watercolor on graph paper; 15 3/8” x 11 3/8”, (in integral artist-made aluminum frame o.d. 16” x 12”)
13.Rework [1], 2016 Synthetic paint, ultraviolet-cured lithographic ink, aluminum panel and components, steel pins; 18” x 29 5/8” x 1”
14. Prima [Grey], 2015 Oil on aluminum panel; 19 5/8” x 13 ¾” (x 5/8”)
15. Someone Like You, 2016 Synthetic paint, ultraviolet-cured ink, aluminum panels and components, steel pins; 18” x 29 5/8” x 1” as installed

Second room, counterclockwise from right, at entry:

16. [Untitled] Drawing [(with Red)], 2009 Colored pencil on paper; paper size 11 ¾” x 8 3/8” in integral frame o.d. 12” x 8 ½”
17. [Untitled] Drawing [(with Red and Yellow)], 2009 Colored pencil on paper; paper size 11 ¾” x 8 3/8” in integral frame o.d. 12” x 8 ½”
18. Track [A], 2016 Synthetic paint, ultraviolet-cured ink, aluminum panel, steel pins; 16” x 12”
19. Track [B], 2016 Synthetic paint, ultraviolet-cured ink, aluminum panel, steel pins; 16” x 12”
20. Track [G], 2016 Synthetic paint, ultraviolet-cured ink, aluminum panel, steel pins; 16” x 12”
21. Track [C], 2016 Synthetic paint, ultraviolet-cured ink, aluminum panel, steel pins; 16” x 12”
22. Track [F], 2016 Synthetic paint, ultraviolet-cured ink, aluminum panel, steel pins; 16” x 12”
23. Track [D], 2016 Synthetic paint, ultraviolet-cured ink, aluminum panel, steel pins; 16” x 12”
24. Prima [Green], 2015 Oil on aluminum panel; 19 5/8” x 13 ¾” (x 5/8”)
25. Prima [White], 2015 Oil on aluminum panel; 19 5/8” x 13 ¾” (x 5/8”)


January 2016

Tom Benson makes paintings, drawings, prints, books and installations that expand an interest in our relationship to images and the condition of their presentation. His work investigates the optic and haptic qualities of surface, their effect on the viewing of the work and the attitude by which we see. In his work a specificity of material is used incorporating both new and old technologies; various print techniques (offset, digital) and a wide range of painting and method of application (artisan and manually applied, alongside others that are mechanical and numerically precise). His recent work tends to make use of an ‘open’ grid structure overlaid with components (samples, colours, images, show announcements, exhibition documentation and material related to past exhibitions), arranged in-situ each time a given work is installed.

The works’ model is propositional and asks what constitutes the limits of a completed work; what it is to see, to touch, to move, to experience position, shadow, light.



Notes on a white painting

David Connearn:
I remember sitting in the bar at the Serpentine with Lawrence Weiner at Frieze, just before he stood up to answer ten questions from the assembled luminaries, maybe you were there?

All went well until one from Martin Creed: What time is it? He kind of hit the roof, internally. On the back of this anger, which included telling the questioner that it was time to grow up, he gave the most cogent response of the whole hour, to the point that art was a serious responsibility and there was precious little time to fuck about. It was amazing.

In the spirit of his answer, I’m asking you: How dare you paint a white painting a century after Malevich?

Tom Benson:
I’d be wary of any dogma or placing of impositions around a white painting (by Malevich, or anyone else for that matter). Anyone can make use of white, with whatever intentions they like.

And Malevich painted a White On White painting - in other words two relative whites.

I’m interested, rather, in the question: when does a work become a white painting and what it can do.

A lot of paintings begin at a preliminary stage, with a ground that is more often than not a white primer. And given my white painting doesn’t have anything on top of its white surface, the question of its similarity to what might be thought of as a primer comes up. So the way it’s painted matters. It’s built up of numerous layers of paint, applied with a soft brush, the strokes run up and down the height of the surface that looks quite flat. It’s painted on an aluminium support, and although the brush strokes aren’t immediately evident they are there, visable, depending on the light.

I make the paint, using titanium pigment (a material commonly used for everything from toothpaste to washing machines). It’s not a very opaque pigment so it takes a lot of layers to obtain at a whiteness where instead of seeing through the material you’re seeing the material and it has a kind of density.

But the paradox occurs in the way it’s made; the application of paint, the movement of the hand and the brush, and the softness of the surface (unlike the surface of an industrially made product), the striations of the brush marks both catch the light and hold the shadows, so it’s possible to see from time to time darkness within the white - a patchiness within the white.

To be sure I’ve crossed the threshold of semi-translucent (and in my mind not a completely white painting), to the soft density I’m interested in, I have to go a lot further in building up that surface than I might have expected. It’s a very difficult thing to see sometimes: am I seeing through the painting or am I seeing light and shadow on the painting’s surface? And when I’m convinced it’s gone far enough - is materially present - it can be called a white painting.

It can still work with incidental light across its surface, which it invariably will - but I don’t want that over played. Rather its layers and the ways you can read that white surface or might see and encounter that white painting should reveal different things at different times. You can see it from afar and ... actually you might not even see it - you might not recognize it because of an apparent blankness or starkness.

Sometimes it’s a very confrontational painting because of the challenges it poses - not just to seeing it as an image but the provocation of what it can become an image of. It produces a clearing – a kind of a space which is very open as opposed to an image of something tethered to identification or to immediate recognition.

And at what point one can say the painting has been seen becomes a very interesting question. Such that what at first seemed barely there grows even though it operates at the fringes of visibility. It dramatises the question: if anything else is even needed, to be able to think about it, to configure it in the mind, as an image. There’s a rush of awareness that happens, sometimes.

I’ve made a few white paintings over the years and they are some of the most extreme and demanding of works, because you’re given a degree of freedom and a sort of a blankness and a challenge to make sense, to make connections, or even to relinquish some of the behaviours that you might have in terms of any reading.

And the painting, because of its non-illusionistic nature (it doesn’t propose a space within itself – it’s a part of the space that a viewer exists in), appears and disappears in that space – it takes on the qualities of that environment. And the difference between one white painting and another is partly underscored by the subtlety of the surface. They’re all distinct, but how easy it is to tell one from the other isn’t straightforward.

The white painting enters into, or makes a space, metaphorically speaking, within the room, for a dialogue with the viewer and what else might be going on: not between them and that piece of work and how they’re reading it but with what else might be preoccupying their thoughts and their life and their concerns. Sometimes it’s a restful painting and sometimes it’s a challenge to noise, so it’s an extreme painting: that’s how I think of it.

July 2014