Steve DiBenedetto "Chaoticus"
David Nolan Gallery
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For his second solo show at David Nolan Gallery, Steve DiBenedetto delivers a new series of paintings and works on paper incited by contemporary architecture’s inability to evolve beyond its
utilitarian and economic constraints. DiBenedetto’s agitated depictions of skyscrapers melting into their structural parts are sources of liberation for the buildings themselves, but ultimately serve as visual metaphors for their generic embodiment of power and nothingness.
Known for his large-scale oil paintings that pit octopi against helicopters amidst a cantankerous backdrop of spinning Ferris-wheels, carrousels and shattered TVs, DiBenedetto departs from his symbolic lexicon to focus on the architectural elements of his imagined world. The introduction of a new medium in several of his works speaks for this shift in interest. DiBenedetto unloads fast drying gouaches and watercolors onto polypropylene with the same confident vigor and rebelliousness as his oils on canvas. The works have a new speed and pull; spilling, bubbling and melting recognizable structural elements into intense pools of abstraction. DiBenedetto teases out the emerging forms, allowing his brush to feel its way across the composition to discover its position and potential within the whole, in the fashion of Philip Guston and Malcolm Morley. The outcome is frenetic, pressurized and ultimately restless. The dimensional limitations of the painting surface cramp the skyscrapers; crouching and bending before hot magenta skies. The rendering of a linear blueprint in watercolor seems frustratingly counterproductive in itself, but perhaps it is this impracticality that DiBenedetto calls for-- the creation of a building with a mind of its own.
Media
Schedule
from May 10, 2008 to June 21, 2008