Benjamin Butler

Butler has sharpened his focus and achieved with his new work a gripping psychedelic effect. These balance critically between conceptual art and Van Gogh's 'Starry Night', but have, it seems, retained a great deal of leeway. "(Will Heinrich, The New York Times)

Over the past fifteen years, Benjamin Butler has been forcing and developing the trees motif as both a conceptual and a visual trope. The trees in his new exhibition appear to us as individual, isolated figures in front of simple color fields in the background. To broaden the pictorial limitations of the motif, Butler refers to the visual vocabularies of modernism and psychedelic art, without losing sight of the folk simplicity or echoes of ubiquitous popular culture. His trees can be considered as individual works of art, but also as parts of forests, as works in interplay with their installation or as a continuation of his long-term project.

Already at his first solo exhibition in 2002, Butler referred to easel paintings of landscapes or simple vedutas. With the new "monochrome" pictures, he returns once more to these early references. While abstracting objects such as trees and branches in the previous images, these monochrome paintings work the other way round. They present the long shot on a distant landscape through the filter of monochrome abstraction. The paintings thus combine two art historical genres, namely landscape painting and minimalism. Figure-ground relationships (underpainting and overpainting), various types of abstraction, as well as the blending of positive and negative images combine to create contemplative, iridescent paintings.

Her conceptual polish disappears behind the almost disarming familiarity. Through self-imposed restrictions Benjamin Butler reinvents his painting from landscape to landscape. The systematic process unfolds in parallel with the beauty of the images, which balance their gestural imagery with conceptual rigor.