NYAB Event - Ben Grasso "Clearing"

Ben Grasso "Clearing"

Thierry Goldberg

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Thierry Goldberg Projects presents Clearing, an exhibition of Ben Grasso’s latest paintings. With his new body of work, Grasso continues to explore the boundaries between notions of representation and abstraction. Tossed like confetti, hurtling parts of man-made structures freeze in midair and mingle with nature—suggesting a potential surprise within all objects.

Grasso targets and tears at the seams of bucolic calm, clearing his own path through pictured landscape. He relates, “I’m more interested in the logic that makes things appear to be ‘real’ or to possibly exist in the world . . . I like that painting can be freeing.” This energy motivates his process and point of view with a will to free all from gravity and structure. In turn, he breaks appearance down to the fringe of abstraction where relations of form and color swarm together. In The Middle of a Wheat Field, associations between exterior and interior (wheat field / straw scarecrow stuffing), trace Grasso’s trademark autonomous demolition.

Disordering the organization of space is an inherent sociological phenomenon that Grasso borrows from Jan Gehl’s book Life Between Buildings. The innate behavior to establish and then subvert limitations expresses how the social spheres of public and private are constructed and maintained. In the paintings Monument to a Place I’ve Been and Edifice, Grasso dismantles the sense of private and public by dissolving the distinction between interior surfaces and exterior planes. Like a dream of Gordon Matta-Clark’s, Grasso’s paintings recall specific places he has visited and the scattered memories inherent to place. As much as he takes apart, Grasso re-collects and reassembles.