Silk of Faded Gold
Jason Benjamin climbs out of his swag and wastes no time getting to work. The light is right, bleached in that post-dawn way that casts strange and surreal shadows. During the course of the long solo day those shadows creep across the plains, shuddering as the clouds distort the light, which eventually succumbs to a blaze of blood-red glory.
The artist doesn’t move a great deal on these sojourns. He doesn’t have to. The world moves for him, playing its tricks of hue within the natural chiaroscuro of the granite outcrops of the Monaro region of South Eastern New South Wales.
The last time I had seen Benjamin was over ten years ago on an extraordinary trip to Lake Eyre and the Australian centre with such fellow artists as Tim Storrier, David Larwill and Rodney Pople. We were all drunk on the landscape (and, to be honest, drunk in that other way that forms amazing camaraderie). Benjamin’s almost obsessive love of the landscape was in abundant proof, but back then, it was captured via the lens of his camera before being rendered onto canvas back in his Sydney studio.
Things have changed over that decade. Benjamin himself has taken on a more rugged and weathered appearance and his work has done the same. He now resembles a character from the novels of one of his favourite authors, Cormac McCarthy and, again, his work has taken on some of the harsh flavor of McCarthy’s writing. Gone is the more European palette of earlier works, replaced by the more stark hues of the Australian outback, as can be so hauntingly witnessed in the fiery dust-storm of such paintings as Now And Forever – fire.
Robert Hughes once famously – and accurately – commented that when Europeans discovered America they discovered freedom, but when Europeans made it to the Antipodes they found a prison. Something of this bleak assessment has found its way into the core of the history of Australian art, from the doom-laden works of John Glover in the Colonial days to the bleak surrealist impulses of the Angry Penguins through to the more contemporary sense of the apocalyptic seen in the works of Peter Booth and Philip Hunter and in George Miller’s Mad Max.
Beneath Benjamin’s rain-laden thunderclouds lies the cruel irony of the land of drought. The eucalypts stand as talismans of deprivation, the granite boulders the headstones of a dying world. Benjamin captures the strange tricks of light that are seen nowhere else on the planet, the way that sunlight carves through the clouds creating an eerie sense of simultaneous movement and stillness, the gentle eddies of air captured by the soaring eagles that so often appear stationary mid-air, their cries piercing the sky.
Best known for his monumental works on canvas, it is Jason Benjamin’s rarely exhibited and extremely intimate works on paper that reveal a technical adroitness all too rarely seen in contemporary Australian art.
A part of this revelation stems from Benjamin being invited to undertake an ongoing artists’ residency at The Australian Museum in Sydney. Sitting in the Director’s office she asked him what he might like to tackle. Benjamin had no idea. And in that moment of blankness he spied upon her walls the encased taxidermed bird life. There was the mission; to bring these literally stuffed animals to life and the result recalls the fastidious line work of Albrecht Dürer.
But Benjamin did not choose his creatures at random, specifically selecting only the creatures that inhabit the locale where the paintings reside. “Portraits of the residents so to speak,” Benjamin says.
The resurrectionist in Benjamin went to work. The dull glass eyes took on character and mischievousness and, at times, malevolence as can be clearly seen in the Yes said the Sky series. The dull feathers and marsupial fur took on a glisten and shine. They came alive.
Something similar was occurring in the landscape. Where once the imagery had been caught on film, it was now captured by the lead of the pencil, in the process torturing the surface of the paper until the works take on the look and feel of imagery from a far previous century. Indeed, they take on something of the hue and texture of a prose description of the Australian landscape by George W. Lambert (1873-1930):
“The sun is down and ‘Micalago’ is at rest
Like Chinese silk of faded gold, the grass…”
Australian Ghosts recall ancient parchment, indeed, like silk of faded gold and perhaps not surprisingly another influence on Benjamin was the Australian artist Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) who Benjamin spent time with and painted a portrait of in 1997. The two artists could not be more different in technical approach, but both endeavor, and succeed in capturing the willful atmospherics of the land.
In the last ten years it seems that Jason Benjamin has travelled the extremes, physically, psychologically and aesthetically. This is, without a doubt, his most powerful body of work to date. The future beckons, harsh, unruly but without doubt beatifically.
– Ashley Crawford
The Waiting Garden
You can stare at the grass in Jason Benjamin’s landscapes for a very long time. It’s so minutely rendered, the wide expanse of it built up one deeply-felt blade at a time, that it draws your eye in ever further. The process of painting it is painstaking and laborious. For Benjamin, it’s a kind of worship.
A little while back, Benjamin sent me a quote from one of his favourite writers, Cormac McCarthy. It ran:
"…he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead."
The quote was, Benjamin said, always with him as he painted. That’s when I understood what his grass was for. One of the singular traits of Benjamin’s landscapes is that the horizons are always low. His landscapes are, mostly, sky. And sky, even as you look at it, is always changing. Whatever is written there – and it can be anything from ecstasy to desolation, hope to regret – it will pass. Against that, his grass is like McCarthy’s steadying hands. That thin strip across the bottom of his paintings is our futile grab at permanence set against the world’s fleetingness and lack of care. It’s the anchor we cast hopefully into the dark, knowing it will never hold. It’s the things we know to be true, balanced against the things we only wish for. It accounts, I think, for much of the sadness in his work.
Every one of Benjamin’s landscapes quivers with emotion. Sometimes it’s sadness, sometimes it’s boundless joy. His landscapes use a spare vocabulary: the same trees, either lush or leafless; roads; wire fences; rocks; that obsessive grass; and birds – always birds. There haven’t been people in them for a long time, and yet we are, all of us, implicitly there. For Benjamin, as for McCarthy, landscape is never just landscape. It’s the screen on which emotion is distilled and made grander. It’s the roiling of our insides projected onto the skin of the world. Love, loss, gratitude, wonderment: he does not shy away from any of these. Our rawest emotions are there in every tree, in every slant of light. In the majesty of the non-human, Benjamin shows us to ourselves.
The invitation in his paintings is not to think, but to feel. It’s an invitation to empathise, in an almost painfully open-hearted way, that necessitates a bypassing of the mind. It reminds me of another line in McCarthy. At the beginning of All the Pretty Horses, the same book that the above quote comes from, the great American author tells us that the most important quality in his main character, John Grady Cole, is that he is ardenthearted. “All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”
Benjamin’s paintings are nothing if not ardenthearted. This is, of course, unfashionable. The mood of our times is cool, its default pose detached. Against this, the ecstasy of a picture like I can see you waiting there for me can seem almost kitsch, its rays of light too radiant. McCarthy, too, has been accused of veering into pulp. But for both men, it’s not kitsch or pulpy: it’s simply a refusal to stand outside an emotion and look in. To be tasteful is always, in some way, to step back from emotion. Taste is never ardenthearted. As Benjamin has said before, “fuck taste.” It is impossible to stand in front of I can see you waiting there for me, and not recognize in it the essence of being most vibrantly, most fleetingly alive.
To me, this latest show speaks most poignantly of the passing of time. Looking at The Waiting Garden, or Wisdom and Happiness, I feel my heart hitch, in a little flutter of panic, at the impermanence of it all. But I kept looking and soon my eye fell on the birds. Tiny and black, they are neither of grass nor sky, free to soar between them. In The Waiting Garden a lone bird flies straight across the canvas, a spear of calm. In Wisdom and Happiness a few birds, shrunk to little more than dots, fly straight into the clouds, their course already struck, their fate now nothing but a consequence. Time still passed. Skies still raced. But my heart stilled because for the birds, at least, this was nothing to be scared of. This new show heeds our longing to snatch from time moments and meanings that are eternal. Yet it also recognizes that the only things that really matter are fleeting.
There is a country, wide and empty, running from Texas into the scorched plains of Mexico, which Cormac McCarthy has made his own. His words have given it a life as real as the white gypsum hills, and this country lives in imaginations around the world. I wonder if there will ever be Jason Benjamin country. It exists already in my mind, when I see a shaft of light fall a certain way, and the landscape around me seems to crack open, just for an instant, with feeling. Painters including Arthur Boyd, Arthur Streeton and Fred Williams changed the way we Australians saw the land around us. Benjamin is changing it again. He is making it the deepest part of ourselves.
Catherine Keenan
Sydney, October, 2011
The Landscape of The Dream
Meditations on the works of Jason Benjamin at BMGArt Adelaide, August 2011
Michelangelo, when appraising the work of painters from Northern Europe, is said to have quipped that, to him, their work was a kind of second rate daubing, as it was driven by the observation of the landscape and objects, rather than an idea of such things within a wider conceptual framework. Many Flemish artists of Northern Europe were spectacularly skilful technicians and were deeply engaged in an increasingly direct account of the visual experience, particularly the fall of light and reflection, while Southern artists explored the theoretical construction of space through Perspective. Nevertheless in the works of say Bosch, Durer or Breughel there is present an allusion to ideas about morality, or beauty, or orders in nature that reveal a grander scheme through inventiveness which distills the observed world and aligns them with the “Southern” Renaissance and Mannerist schools of thought.
Michelangelo Buonarotti was referring to a conceptual divide in the making of art that is as alive today as it was in the 16th and 17th centuries. Little did he know that two hundred years later painting would address the direct perceptual experience of nature through the Barbizon school, the Impressionists and on to the Coldstream school in London.
A great deal of energy is expended in contemporary practice and theory asserting that the visual arts have transcended the perceptual account of the world in order to address a cultural/political critique. To many people, both audience and practitioners, the experience of visual arts today is either hindered or liberated by the material form of a work and the notion of skill in the “hands” of the visual artist. My initial encounter with the works of Jason Benjamin gave rise to elements of the preceding narrative. I was consistently aware of the landscape as a metaphor, an invention. Benjamin gathers references from field trips, which he then stores to give impressions time to earn their place in paintings and drawings. His images appear to arrive fully formed which imbues the surfaces of the works with a Classical smoothness and attention to detail reminiscent of the work of Eugene Von Guerard in the Australian context. But this is where things divide. Where Von Guerard recorded the landscape of Australia with a forensic eye for botanic accuracy, Benjamin records the apprehended spirit of place. It is interesting here to remember the “Colonial” painters like Thomas Wainewright and Conrad Martens as examples of artists who depicted the Australian landscape through a European filter in order to express more than likeness. They saw the landscape as a model of Arcadia, a perfect ,exotic place. Benjamins’ work is steeped in tradition but not bound by it, he chooses the deliberate, honed appearance of the images as the aperture through which we are invited into the theatre of silence, where the horizon is a turning not an end. I am here reminded of the paintings of Giorgio DeChirico, which utilize the horizon like the stage meeting the cyclorama in a theatre. Not only that but how surprisingly thin and smooth DeChiricos’ paint handling was as it reveals the drawn line of thought and finally the reordered world of the dream, the uncertainty of the poet.
Jason Benjamin is not tentative but extraordinarily sensitive to small breezes and pressure shifts in his world. A hill is not just a hill, it becomes a slight heaving in the skin of the earth. A rock is revealed because the earth wore away, was eroded and in being visible, becomes more than geological nuance, it suggests big forces and hidden structures . The terrain as a whole is imbued with the a visual language which addresses Benjamins’ seismic response to not only place as site but place as the “melancholic” reverie where the slightest tremor of emotion, triumph, longing and loss is registered in a wave of grass or the soaring chorus of sky.
The drawings are small, pencil on washed, scrubbed, patinated heavy rag papers. The graphite pencil is used like an etching needle. It does not just mark the paper it incises the surface leaving indentations as though the graphite isn’t enough. Even the material of the drawing is a microscopic landscape of valleys and hills, which coalesce to form an image even more dream-like than the paintings. The artist Paul Delveaux comes to mind with his haunting invented figures in set pieces of theatre.
The exhibition at BMGArt in Adelaide was titled “I Thought You Would Always Be Here”, a poignant musing on mutability in the title work in which a tree embodies not just likeness but all that is impermanent, transient. There is a wonderful tension here between the almost breathless stasis of the images and the collective rumbling energy of the tectonic shifts and grinds being apprehended by Benjamins’ radar. The title also addresses appearances, how things appear to be but are not , as in a tree which looks massive and permanent but is not. A broken wire in a fence becomes an escape , the rupture of a border, or is it just a broken wire?
Jason Benjamin is made of many parts but I think he has two major polarities, the Romantic/Melancholic and the Classicist/Idealist and as long as this binary is within him he has a great deal of great work to do.
Christopher Orchard.
Adelaide, September 2011.
Jason Benjamin
Selected Biography
1971 Born in Melbourne. Lives and works in Sydney
1989-90 Pratt Institute, New York City
Solo Exhibitions – Selected
2013 -Artist in Residence “A Clear Path”Red Gate Gallery Beijing, China
2013-14 “Everyone Is Here” touring Survey Exhibition :
Wagga Regioal Art Gallery, Griffith Regional Art Gallery, Dubbo Arts Centre, Cowra Regional Gallery, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Hazelhurst Regional Art Gallery
2013- “Great Adventures” Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane
2012- “Post History” Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne
2011- “The Waiting Garden” Greenhill Galleries, Perth
2011- “I thought you’d always be here” BMG ART, Adelaide
2010 “We Built Cities” Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane
2010 “Shelter” Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay, Sydney
2008 “Written on Land” Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay, Sydney
2008 “Who you’re supposed to be” Hirokazu Degawa, Hillside Forum, Tokyo 14th-April 30th April
2008 “Have you become my body?” Jan Murphy Gallery 14th March- 20th March
2007 “Set yourself free” Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 14th June
2007 “Seven paths to her heart” Hirokazu Degawa, Tokyo, Japan, 4th April
2007 “If the air could speak” Galleria Tondinelli, Rome Italy, 15th February
2006 “Where dreams go” BMG ART , 6TH October – 28th October
2006 “Borderland” Greenhill Galleries, Perth, 15 September – 6th October
2005 “There is a place” Metro 5 Art Gallery, Melbourne, 5th October – 29th October
2005 “Because of you I see a light” Metro 5 Gallery, Sydney Art Fair, October
2004 “Lost time” Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, 12 November – 27 November
2004 “In a heartbeat” Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 24th March- 22nd April
2003 “Don’t look down” Nicola Townsend & Hirokazu Degawa, Daikenyama, Tokyo, Japan
2003 “The Clearing” Greenhill Galleries, Perth, 10 October- 28th October
2002 “Lifting up the sun” Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney, 10 Sept – 28 Sept
2002 “Unbound”Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane
2002 “This is love” Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 17 April- 5th May
2001 “I found the world so new”, Tim Olsen Gallery & Amanda Wolfe-Daimpre, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Soho, Central, Hong Kong, 4th October- 17th October
2001 “Stronger than you think” 28 Charlotte St Gallery, London, England, 15
March- 7th April
2001 “Make it home“ Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne,10th March- 31st March
2001 “Good Luck” Greenhill Galleries, Perth, 22nd May- 12 June
2000 “Belong” Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney, 30th May- 17th June
2000 “Hold” Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, 17th August – 2nd September
2000 “The hand upon your Back” Greenhill Galleries, Perth, 14th March- 4th April
1999 “First came joy” Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney, 3rd August- 21st August
1998 “There are things you don’t see coming” Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney
1998 “Hopeful Prey” Greenhill Galleries, Perth, 10th November- 27th November
1997 “Ghosts amongst the Angels” Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney, 12 August- 30th August
1996 “Covered by the Rushes” Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney, 8th October- 19th October
1993 “ The apple trees” Crawford Gallery, Sydney
1990 Trinity College, Dallas, Texas, USA
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Group Exhibitions
2012 Murra’ Ma Contemporary Australian Art, Michael Reid Berlin
2012 Gold Award, Rockhampton QLD
2012 Tattersalls Landscape Prize, Brisbane
2011 Archibald Prize, Sydney
2011 Tattersall’s Landscape Prize, Brisbane
2010 Tattersalls Landscape Prize, Brisbane
Doug Moran National Portrait Prize
2010 Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane
2010 Greenhill Galleries, Perth
2005 Archibald Prize,Art Gallery of New South Wales, 30th April- 3rd July
Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, 9th July- 7th August
Moree Plains Gallery, 13th August- 11th September
Cowra Art Gallery, 17 September- 16 October
Albury Regional Art Gallery, 21 October- 13 November
Victorian Arts Centre, 25th November- 19th February, 2006
Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, 18 March – 9 April
2004 “Post-Modern and Contemporary Australian Art”, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 17 April- 8th May
2003 “William Creek and Beyond”, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery touring exhibition, Shepparton Art Gallery, Tamworth City Gallery, New England Regional Art Museum, Noosa Regional Art Gallery, Gold Coast City Gallery, Gladstone Regional Art Gallery Museum, The Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra Cowra Art Gallery.
Savill Contemporary, Melbourne, 10 April- 11th May
Art Miami, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, Miami, USA
2002 3-person show, Bunkamura Gallery, in conjunction with Nicola Townsend and Hirokazu Degawa Tokyo, Japan
2002 4x4 Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane
Art London 2002, London, England
The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize,
First Birthday Exhibition, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 8th May- 16th June
2001 Art London 2001, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London, England, 22nd May-
26th May
Nicola Townsend, Tokyo, Japan
Landscape Painting, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne
Hills Grammar Art Award, Sydney
2000 Meet 2 x 2, Tim Olsen Gallery Sydney
Ten Australian Artists, Australian high commission Singapore
Nicola Townsend, Tokyo, Japan
Kings School Art Prize, Sydney
Norvill Landscape Prize, Murrundi
Conrad Jupiter Art Prize, Brisbane
Fleurieu Landscape Prize, South Australia
Tattersalls Landscape prize, Sydney
1999 Millennium Art Prize
University and Schools Club, Sydney
Westpac Art Prize, SCEGGS Redlands, Sydney
Tattersalls Landscape Prize, Brisbane
Kings School Art Prize, Sydney
1998 Salon de Refuses, SH Erwin Gallery, Sydney
Painting is not Dead, Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney
Australian Contemporary Art Fair, Melbourne
1997 Kings School Art Prize, Sydney
Jeans for Genes, Gianni Versace, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney Devoured by Paint
1997 Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney
1996 Mosman Art Prize, Sydney
1995 Exhibition with furniture, David Jones, Sydney
1994 Mosman Art Prize, Sydney
Exhibition for David Jones Spring Flower Show, Sydney
1993 Mosman Art Prize, Sydney
Salon de Refuses, SH Erwin Gallery, Sydney
1991 Gary Anderson Gallery, Sydney
1989 Mars, New York City
Collections
Australian National Gallery, Canberra
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Rockhampton Regioan Art Gallery, Queensland
Christ Church Grammar School, Perth WA
Derwent Collection, Tasmania
Tweed River Regional Art Gallery
Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria
Macquarie Bank, Victoria
Ballarat Art Gallery, Victoria
Shepperton Art Gallery, Victoria
Gold Coast City Gallery, Queensland
Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery
Art Space Makay. Regional Art Gallery and Museum
Castlemaine Regional Art Gallery
Parliament House Art Collection
Artbank, Sydney
Awards
2012 Finalist, Gold Award, Rockhampton, QLD
2012 Finalist, Tattersall’s Landscape Prize
2011 Finalist, Archibald Prize
2011 Finalist, Tattersall’s Landscape Prize
2011 Finalist, Albany Art Prize
2010 Finalist, Tattersal’s Landscape Prize
2006 Finalist, Doug Moran Portrait Prize
2005 Packing Room Prize, Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales
2004 Finalist, Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales
2002 Finalist, The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize
1997 Kings School Art Prize
Commissions
2004, Unfinished Journey, overseas project, exhibition and publication
2003, Queen Mary 11, London, sixteen paintings for new cruise ship
2002 William Creek and Beyond
2001, Lake Eyre and Beyond, collaborative project involving ten prominent
artists for exhibition, a publication and print folio
2001, Burswood Hotel, Perth
2000 Chanel, Australia
