5/06/2006

Ben Grasso

25 comments:

Painter said...

Ben Grasso @
Sixtyseven Gallery
27th Street

no-where-man said...

some where over the rainbow. ! love it.

flesheater99 said...

Yes. Yes. O god yes!

no-where-man said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
pinkandlacepony said...

oiley brush. i had the same thought.

jpegCritic said...

On-point...
Grasso/Cvijanovic-Cvijanovic/Grasso...
Ripoff or zeitgeist?

youth--less said...

I never met an explosion I didnt like.

Explosion is a sneaky way to paint an ab-ex without actually having to admit it. Didnt Julie Mehrtu do that about 6 years ago?

jpegCritic said...

bravo.

jpegCritic said...

Zeitgiest.

...Because explosions signify our sanitized view of
destruction (or killing) without having to admit
to the experience of destruction and killing.
And they're spectacular.

Perhaps somewhere out there, someone's doing a
painterly articulation of destruction-by-machete.
No, not Nitsche, and not a reversed destrution,
but real human destruction. The unbearably spectacular.

Now that would be a painting I'd remember.

Explosions are great because they are as effective as
they are celebratory. The destructive and the benign
all served in one great visual and practical device.

And they always look great in reproduction,
and they sell like hotcakes, without any trail
leading to implications.

Maybe that's why we use them so much.

Stelios Argiros said...

Kinda like Adam Cvijanovic (bellwethergallery.com/) meets Barnaby Furnas (marianneboeskygallery.com) minus the people. Wierd.

Stelios Argiros said...

There is this, as Jerry Saltz had wrote, a lot of "clusterfuck" aesthetic (http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz12-7-05.asp) going on. Maybe as the world is getting closer we as artist have more "stuff" to add to our work that this cluster of things and information inevitably happens... ? Like the internet.

no-where-man said...

you tube is a great example of this.

youth--less said...

as I understand the entymology of the clusterfuck--it comes from a military term that refers to when a lot of things go wrong all at once. Of course the initial definition of clusterfuck is group sex. So it pisses me off when the military takes something essentially positive and twists it into a derogatory term. especially since they are such a huge part of what is going wrong now.

a confluence of styles, complexity, confusion, emotion, our desparate, poignant attempt to make sense of it, to make it work for everyone. a clusterfuck indeed.

no-where-man said...

The frivilous seems more frivilous, the shallow
shallower, and the meaningful more meaningful.

youth--less said...

" The frivilous seems more frivilous, the shallow shallower, and the meaningful more meaningful."

That sounds like a comment from someone who is stoned.

Just sayin ;)

no-where-man said...

jer gets high?

zipthwung said...

Im off to see the wizard of
1995

peter garfield, ladies and others!

THeres a great fluff piece in the NYT on "deskilling" of artists here

"We're in a post-Conceptual era where it's really the artist's idea and vision that are prized, rather than the ability to master the crafts that support the work," said Jeffrey Deitch, whose SoHo gallery specializes in large-scale productions by contemporary artists. "Today our understanding of an artist is closer to a philosopher than to a craftsman."

AND

Patrick Barth, a Brooklyn art fabricator with a graduate degree in sculpture from Ohio State University, agrees that ideas are more highly valued than the technical skills required to execute them. "You come out of these schools knowing how to build things," he said, "then you get to New York and find out that that has nothing to do with your success as an artist. I have no problem with that now, but I was upset for a while that no one had told me how things work."

zipthwung said...

Anybody see the ""An Ongoing Low-Grade Mystery" at Paula's Palace?

I'm not sure I get it.

Max said...

This is a painting about a supernatural moment... a house rises off the ground and shatters against a calm sky, refracting its form into constituent bits and pieces. Yet, despite the violence of the scene it is painted in a very placid and matter of fact manner. Some mystery is left, the top of the house and lifting space above it being obscured, but by and large, we are presented with the occurrence as a fact, and one that seems almost quiet and implicitly natural and benign.

I'm not sure I ca pin down exactly what this is to say (a crumbling house can have so many interlocked metaphors that each viewer will likely pick the one that is most meaningful to him/her), but it is interesting that this image that has been noted above as being wrought with "clusterfuck" symbolism is made to seem so calm and tepid. It's the opposite of what a lot of painters are doing to illustrate the confusion and overload of the information age, here it has been crystallized into a moment of something like clarity, calm and beauty.

no-where-man said...

i thought 'cluster fuck' in this thread was in reference to the thread itself, - the nature of internet and the form of conversation at large and not this work.

Max said...

Clusterfuck came from that Saltz article linked above... I think it is supposed to refer to art making in a jumbled, messy additive manner. "New Cacophony", as Saltz calls it. He seems to think it is a rising mode of working, and "...can be seen as a way to compete with the paranoia and havoc of everyday life; a homeopathic dose of poison whereby ruins are created to counteract ruin..."


(saltz 12-7-05)



Seems logical. Still, many periods of art making have had similar tendencies, baroque, rococo, Netherlands medieval. Were they too concerned with the "havoc of everyday life", or just on the other end of a wane/wax of interest in the empty canvas vs. the full.

no-where-man said...

got that it was from the article, thought it applied to the logic of internet and this blog, not the painting... encompassing other forms like Scatter Art

Unknown said...

Ben Grasso...what a hoot! Last time I saw Ben he was in my 8th grade art class. I knew he was one of the best I'd seen in the my classroom. I love the work I have seen on the web site and it is so clean, so pure in technique. Great to see Ben's work on line.
Kathie Germano, Mayfield High School, Mayfield Village, OH

MastreMahem said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
MastreMahem said...

As I am leaving this comment a good 2 1/2 years after the last comment was left, I'm pretty sure no one will ever, ever read this. But that's even more exciting to me, that anybody probably won't ever read this, but just possibly might. Neat, huh?

And so: It's odd that no one has ever mentioned the actual subject of the painting; more specifically, the particular relevance of of the style - the historical period - of the disintegrating house. The "obvious" is usually the most elusive, or deceptive bit. Jeeesh, it's like talking to children...