Christopher Benson

I have always had a painterly approach, with brush and knife marks clearly evident in my surfaces. The slick stylizations of much of the work proliferating today across the internet and at the art fairs and galleries does not interest me much. We’re so neurotic about artistic novelty now that much of the contemporary art of the past few decades feels quite superficial to me. Somewhere along the line, painting especially became more of a product line than the sort of probing visual poetry that first called me to this path.

There’s nothing wrong with modernity. I want to be modern too. And, if we’re honest, we don’t have a choice, do we? We live in the modern world and anything we do here will inevitably reflect it, even when we try to hide from it by re-inventing the past. But I often think how Edouard Manet ( a leading innovator of early Modernism) was so startlingly contemporary in his own time while yet tipping his hat to the masters who had preceded him. That was part of what made his work so rich and complex. For me too, new works that can’t comfortably retain some of the hoary residue of painting’s past offer a pretty thin soup; I just find myself wanting more to eat.

—Christopher Benson