Paintings and Video - Ben Charles Weiner

Ben Weiner: Paintings and Video
September 3 – October 16, 2011
eGallery, Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University
Ben Weiner: Paintings and Video is a New & Emerging Artists Series program presented by the
Tarble Arts Center and EIU Art Department. The exhibition is made possible through the kind
cooperation of Mark Moore Gallery, Benriman Contemporary LLC, and the artist.
Artist’s Lecture: Tuesday, September 20, 7pm, Atrium
The Tarble Arts Center and Art Department are divisions of the Eastern Illinois University College of
Arts & Humanities. Tarble programs are funded by the Tarble Arts Center Fund/EIU Foundation,
Tarble Arts Center membership contributions, and other sponsors as listed.
The Artist
Ben Weiner lives and works in New York City. Born in 1980 in Burlington, Vermont, Weiner received
his BA from Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut). He also studied under Mexican muralist
José Lazcarro at Universidad de las Americas (Mexico) and has worked closely with artists Jeff
Koons, Kimsooja and Amy Yoes as an assistant. Known for his photorealistic oil paintings and
stop-motion videos, Weiner has exhibited his work widely across the United States and in Mexico.
Solo shows have been presented in Los Angeles, New York and Santa Fe, and group exhibitions
in Chicago, New York, Miami, New Haven, Los Angeles and St. Louis. Specific venues include The
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, Connecticut), The Carnegie Art Museum (Oxnard,
California), The Riverside Art Museum (California), and Artspace (New Haven, Connecticut ). His
paintings can be found in the Sammlung/Collection (Germany) and the Frederick R. Weisman
Art Foundation Collection (California). Writing about Weiner’s art has been published in The New
York Times, artUS, The Los Angeles Times, New American Paintings, and other sources. He also
designed video projections for the interdisciplinary theatrical production of La Historia de Llorar por
El by Ignacio Apolo shown in Mexico City in 2006. Weiner was a 2010 New York Foundation for
the Arts Fellow and is represented by Mark Moore Gallery (Culver City, California), David Richard
Contemporary (Santa Fe, New Mexico), and Benrimon Contemporary (New York, New York).
Location: 2010 9th Street on the EIU campus, Charleston. Free admission. For information: 217581-ARTS (-2787), [email protected], www.eiu.edu/tarble.
© 2011 Eastern Illinois University Board of Trustees for the Tarble Arts Center; the images are used
with the permission of the artist.
BEN WEINER: Paintings and Video
September 3 – October 16, 2011 | eGallery, Tarble Arts Center | Eastern Illinois University
The Art
By photographing paint and artificial materials at close range, then using the resulting image as his
subject, Ben Weiner creates works that pose a confusion of object, subject and medium. Weiner
uses the ready-made illusionism of these materials as embryos for large-scale, photorealistic oil
paintings and dreamlike time-lapse videos that hover between realism and abstraction. Weiner’s
paintings and videos tend to resemble organic terrains, viewing the unnatural as if it were natural
and reflecting our symbiotic relationship to science. Individually, these sensual works immerse the
viewer in their illusion. Collectively, they catalogue uses of artifice in our daily lives, reflecting the
permeation of artifice and imitation into ordinary experience in the digital age.
The Exhibition
C3H6O2 H2O (Deodorant), oil on linen, 2010, 28” x 42”
TiO2, oil on linen, 2010, 28” x 42”
C18H21NO, color video on LCD monitor, 2010, 26.5” x 40.5” x 4.5”
Na + (aq) + C5H8NO (aq) NaC5H8NO4(s), color video on LCD monitor, 2010, 26.5” x 40.5” x 4.5”
[H20(i) ®H2O(g)], (C6H9NO)n, C3H8O2,C26H20N2Na2O8S24, color video on LCD monitor,
2010, 26.5” x 40.5” x 4.5”
C18H32O2C20H30O2C10H18C22H20)13, color video on LCD monitor, 2010, 26.5” x 40.5” x 4.5”
The above artworks lent courtesy of Mark Moore Gallery, Culver City, California.
C6H1206, NaC5H8N04, C6H807, oil on linen, 2011, 28” x 42”
121A00
NON-PROFIT
ORGANIZATION
US POSTAGE
PAID
PERMIT NO 24
CHARLESTON IL
61920-3099
The above artworks lent courtesy of Benrimon Contemporary LLC, New York, New York.
Eastern Illinois University
HFCS, oil on linen, 2009, 32” x 48”
600 Lincoln Avenue
Charleston, IL 61920-3099
CH2O, oil on linen, 2010, 28” x 42”
Take for example, the painting TiO2, C34H22Cl2N4O2, C18H32O2, C10H16, C20H30O2, AgX,
which shows several thick daubs of oil paint. As in all of the works in this series, the title faithfully
reports the chemical compounds which make up the subject depicted. In this case, the first
five elements listed constitute a traditional artists’ mixture: the pigments Titanium Dioxide and
Permanent Violet, along with linseed oil, the solvent turpentine, and varnish for gloss. It’s the paint
recipe Weiner uses.
The title’s fifth ingredient, however, is silver halide, found not in the painter’s arsenal, but in the
light sensitive coating of photographic paper. Sure enough, on the right side of the painting’s
composition, a pink band of emulsion becomes obvious, and it’s no longer as simple as a painting
of paint. We now realize we’re dealing with a painting of a photograph of paint. This layering of
medium becomes more apparent as we recognize other photographic tendencies within the
composition. There is a focus issue, for instance: the daub in the painting’s foreground has sharp,
white highlights, while the background stroke is blurry, its reflections softer.
Weiner’s mode of representation, then, is as intimately wrapped up with photography’s mimetic
properties as it is with painting’s illusionistic ones. His style can most obviously be understood
to be that of photorealistic painting, which too often asks to be admired for its sheer skill. By all
means, admire – the technical mastery on display here is the kind that makes you thankful Weiner
has not forsaken representation. Only don’t stop there, because his is as much a conceptually
rigorous project as a visually pleasing one.
C6H12O6, NaC5H8NO4, C6H8O7, 2011, oil on linen, 28 x 42 inches
If the introduction of photography to Weiner’s methods complicates the idea that his chosen
medium is painting alone, then his more recent turn to video would seem to muddy the issue even
more. Each several minute video is comprised of thousands of still photographs, which Weiner
takes of the experiments he conducts with various materials, and edits together. The scientific
Peculiar Operations
Ben Weiner’s paintings are about painting, or maybe more accurately, about paint. As the artist
himself is the first to admit, his work belongs within a conversation about medium specificity: about
Modernism as an inherently self-conscious, self-critical endeavor. In his landmark 1960 essay
“Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg lobbied for “that which was unique and irreducible not
only in art in general, but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine,” he wrote, “through
the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself.”1
overtone of the word experiments (the one the artist uses) is well-founded: the small
plastic vials in which he subjects substances like hair gel ([H2O(l) ® H2O(g)], (C6H9NO)
n, C3H8O2, C28H20N2Na2O8S2, with its colloidal consistency) and MSG (Na(aq) +
C5H8NO(aq) ---> NaC5H8NO4(s), with its crystalline structure) to the effects of time evoke
chemistry class beakers. And the artist’s attention to his materials’ elemental natures –
both in his slow observation of their changes, and his foregrounding of this information in
the works’ titles – is legitimately lab-like.
Yet even as these science experiments, these peculiar operations, become undeniably
sculptural, even as they’re captured in photographs and edited and looped into videos,
they remain somehow always about paint. Each of the materials highlighted shares not
only paint’s physical sensuality, but its inherent character as a purveyor of artifice. From the
unnatural substances that we apply to our bodies (gel, deodorant), to those we ingest (high
fructose corn syrup, MSG, sports drinks), otherwise eventually incorporate (formaldehyde),
or wish to dissolve into (the pixels of a computer screen), Weiner meditates on how we
embrace the ersatz in an attempt to resist mortality.
It is also no accident that Weiner shows his videos on flat monitors that share almost the
same dimensions as his paintings. By setting up an equivalency between his screens
and his canvases, he reveals a preoccupation with the tension between an image and an
object (the same tension, incidentally, that defined the split between Greenberg’s Modernist
painters and the Minimalist object makers in the late 1950s and early 60s).
Weiner’s videos even allude to painting’s traditional genres. If the aforementioned painting of
paint is a take on the still life, then the effect of magnifying microscopic worlds is to produce
unlikely landscapes. With its cool aqua tones and drifting bubbles, the sequence of hair gel
evaporating can be seen as an oceanscape, akin to one of Jean Painlevé’s mesmerizing
undersea films. And the video C18H32O2, C20H30O2, C10H16, C22H20O13, a protracted,
enlarged view of paint being mixed (in a combination similar to the one described above, only
this time with red pigment), becomes a primordial terrain, an oozing flow of lava bubbling up
from the deep. In the video’s last moments before relooping, the color spreads across the
field – in this case a screen – dissolving these associations into the even ground of a color
field painting.
Samantha Friedman, Curatorial Assistant, Museum of Modern Art
For Greenberg, this intrinsic quality specific to painting was flatness, as embodied in the Color
Field painters’ depthless staining, or in the degree zero of the monochrome. And though Weiner’s
work is explicitly self-referential vis à vis its medium, it does not gesture toward this limit of painting.
Rather, his project opens up the possibilities of paint, and of painting. The five canvases and four
videos on view in this exhibition, like most of the artist’s work, revel in the stuff’s raw properties and
its capacity for conjuring illusion simultaneously. The work thematizes not only the materiality, but
also the potentiality of paint.
__________________
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” First published in Forum Lectures (Voice of
America), Washington, D.C., 1960. Reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Art
in Theory: 1900-2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
2003), p. 774.
1
This is because Weiner’s work is not only painting about paint, it is also, quite literally, painting of
paint. Painting is subject matter as much as medium here, a move that allows Weiner to have his
cake and eat it too. Like a good Modernist, he references his chosen medium, yet he does so
without giving up the opportunity to render subject matter with the illusionism that was painting’s
primary goal for centuries before its mid-twentieth century dead end.
[H2O(l) ® H2O(g)], (C6H9NO)n, C3H8O2, C28H20N2Na2O8S2, 2010, video on loop (still), displayed on 26.5 x 40.5 x 4.5 inch screen