6 - 30 June 2018

Benjamin Werner

Night Blooms

Benjamin Werner’s Night Blooms is an adrenalin rush of pixelated colour, light and darkness. So much of his work from the last 15 years has been about the urban landscape and, while this remains a touchstone, now the presence of the forest stalks the cityscape, a shadowy representation of the natural environment. Encroaching Swarm (2018) and Enroach (2018) create a remote vantage point from which the urban centre is screened with dark tree trunks. Gridlines are captured in lines of lights from a high, but not far away, vantage point. Other works, such as Midnight Swarm (2018), take us into dark interior forests that exclude the city altogether, a place where strangely lit blooms haunt the foreground and an electric aura hovers above the ground.

Werner’s early influences are thick and rich, ranging from Gerhard Richter, who also works across abstraction and figuration, to Jon Cattapan, whose cityscapes are driven by nightmarish visions from science fiction, film, and global culture. Werner’s painterly exploration of light and energy was initially influenced by the bokeh photographic technique, which selectively creates blurriness in particular areas of an image. Since 2010 he has explored surface, light, colour, and sensation in paint and LED-driven installations with method and rigour, an investigation that has crystallised this milieu as his own.

Night Blooms evokes an increasingly urgent debate about human impact on the climate, yet the seductive aesthetic of these paintings parallels the lure of the technologies and substances that have proven so environmentally destructive. This paradox signifies a universal and personal conundrum. Cities are the lifeblood of humanity, the hub of our industry, the site of our social connections, and are essential to the cultural richness that feeds creative energies. Yet their concentration of populations, traffic, and demand for power continues to create ever-growing waste, pollution, and damage to the natural environment. In crystallising the artificiality of our experience, these paintings highlight the shifting balance of the natural world and the precipice on which humanity perches.

These issues of urban density are palpable in the developing cities of Asia, a broad region which has been part of Werner’s personal landscape in recent years. He has undertaken mural commissions, residencies, and professional art-handling opportunities with five trips to Hong Kong in the last five years, six trips to Thailand since 2014, and repeat visits into Singapore and Japan (where he visited the forests and vantage points from which to view their cities). The atmospherics in these paintings were inspired in part by the experience of being in population centres which dwarf any Australian city, with clouds of fireflies transformed as lit circular shapes, re-rendered as glowing and coloured energy, and representing a haze of warmth in the foreground holding the distant city at bay. Hunting for witches (2018) has a sense of mystical adventure that can be found away from the distracting metropolis, under the cover of night, where glowing blue lights create a sense that dark magic may unfold.

Image (left): Benjamin Werner, Home, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30cm. Photo: Mick Richards.

Image (right): Benjamin Werner, Twilight Swarm, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 180cm. Photo: Mick Richards.

Night Blooms evokes an increasingly

urgent debate about human

impact on the climate, yet the

seductive aesthetic of these

paintings parallels the lure of the

technologies and substances that

have proven so environmentally

destructive. This paradox signifies a

universal and personal conundrum.

Benjamin Werner, Night Blooms

1

In this exhibition, paintings with an increasingly shallow picture plane compress their pixelated colour and pattern, rendered as stippled spots and dots, in and around dark vertical tree trunks, entrancing yet claustrophobic in their containment. The fields of colour that unfold behind the trunks in Gateway X, Two Five Ten One and Mix (2018) close out the horizon line. We are immersed in an increasingly private and interior landscape, one sufficiently recognisable to us, where the stippled colour moves across an unnatural landscape and shadows lean in. The ground underneath these fields of colour is not itself visible, yet its undulations take the eye into a meditative and melancholic exploration of this other-worldly region. Winter Swarm (2018) is icy in colour, with a glow of uncanny light low to the ground, while Eukaryotic (2018) uses strong colour to suggest toxicity in the psychedelia that grows under the forest.

These vignettes of colour and energetic forms take us into the remembered aesthetic of late nights in the city, a sensory evocation of blurry surfaces under artificial light, under musical and other influences. They evoke the experience with slices of recall, moments that become a patchworked contemporary consciousness to contemplate.

In Werner’s oeuvre, two exhibitions from 2008 and 2009 stand aside from this developing abstraction of the physical landscape. In the facebook he detailed the milieu of his art life with portraits of iconic art world figures such as Richter (and also featured their shared social media interactions) and of local high-profile figures such as Richard Bell, Archie Moore, and Alison Kubler. He captured this world in paint like someone looking in from the outside. Show Ponies examined his own aesthetic affectations—the tattoos he has accumulated since he was 14 and a Ned Kelly-style beard—with other fictionalised images and artefacts that refer to celebrities including Chopper Read and Paris Hilton.

Other writers have noted Werner’s interest in the sublime within the everyday and the suburban, yet Night Blooms also draws in a sense of Shakespearean portent as he moves his creative energies into a darker and more introverted space, a soundtrack that feels a bit like Nick Cave communing with Icelandic band Sigur Rós.

Louise Martin-Chew

Image (cover): Benjamin Werner, XX in Blue, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 180cm. Photo: Mick Richards.

Image (above): Benjamin Werner in front of Hunting for witches, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 180cm. Photo: Mick Richards.

Sponsor

Benjamin Werner and Onespace Gallery would like to thank: Susan Kenrick; Alan Holyman; Ian Smith; Trish Contreras; Miriam Carter; Louise Martin-Chew; Simon Wright and QAGOMA staff;

Mick Richards; Terry Young; 3E Innovative; Scott Campbell; Funky Munky; Michelle James; The West End Magazine and Matt Rees Signs.

onespacegallery.com.au Gallery Directors, John Stafford and Jodie Cox

13a Gladstone Road, john@onespacegallery.com.au and Highgate Hill QLD 4101 jodie@onespacegallery.com.au Australia +61 7 3846 0642 Gallery Officer, Jamie Mercer

Wed to Fri: 10am – 5pm jamie@onespacegallery.com.au Sat: 9am – 3pm Gallery Assistant, Alicia Hollier alicia@onespacegallery.com.au

Benjamin Werner is an Australian artist with a studio based in ‘Avalon’ in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. Avalon is a locally famous Brisbane apartment block, “a utopian half-timbered collection of 26 flats constructed back in 1929”, valorised in a publication edited and designed by Ricardo Felipe. Werner is one of a prominent number of current and former artist inhabitants’ alumni of the building and its mystique.

Since completing his Honours Degree in 2004 in fine art at Queensland College of Art, Werner has held annual solo exhibitions of new bodies of work and exhibited in many group shows and art prizes. His work is held in numerous private and public collections such as City of Brisbane collection, State Library of Queensland and the Mater Mothers’ Hospital.

This new body of work, Night Blooms, is also destined for exhibition at the Australian High Commission in Singapore in October 2018.

Reviewing this publication in 2005, critic Rex Butler (‘Art’s hot spots’, The Courier Mail) suggested “The book takes off from the enchanting premise that a building can provide a kind of genius loci for a group of artists, that a subtle commonality pervades all those who live and work there. Seen another way, Avalon is a touching tribute to all that is left behind in history – not only the apartment block itself, …. but also, to the artists themselves.”

Werner takes his membership of this alumni seriously. His practice revolves around the search for the sublime in optics and colour, borrowing from both additive and subtractive colour theories. His current practice involves oil painting, LED artworks and installations; all centred on his light-based studies taken from many cities around the world.