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
Jason Benjamin
A minimalist spirit has crept into Jason Benjamin’s paintings. In this new body of work, his palette is more restricted and his subjects more spartan. This distillation of space and light invites contemplation, and while loosely based on the austere environment of the Monaro region with its vast yellowing grasslands and granite outcrops, Benjamin’s landscapes are rarely literal or precise. While eucalypts thwarted by farming, fog bound vistas and bruised skies may invite an ecological reading, Benjamin eschews the didactic turn in landscape painting. Instead, he offers the viewer visions that approximate psalms in painted form.
Titles such as Song of thanks and Steps of the faithful underscore this sacred dimension. Made in threes with each painting divisible by the next (in terms of scale), Benjamin has carefully composed a numinous experience for his viewers. He cites a fascination with Chinese landscape traditions, the influence of which can be detected in his calligraphic gum trees, and confesses his love for the elegant minimalism of Canadian born Agnes Martin and the estranged melodies of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Like Martin and Pärt, he is committed to refining his idiom by stripping away all unnecessary elements and submitting to simplicity. This reduction is for Benjamin a brave revelation of vulnerability, one which has lead to a new found serenity, for both the artist and his paintings.
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.
