Benjamin Echeverria
May 8 - June 12, 2021

PRESS RELEASE

Practice this: the marks you are seeing are invisible. 

 The mind is not a localized phenomenon; thinking occurs everywhere. These machines operate within that assumption. They make marks to gage the limits of time passing and to record shifts of location in space. They take canvas, oil paint, dust, keys…, cut them, pit them one against the other, extract them from their established relationships, knead, reassemble, insert, compress, and then sit waiting in a corner of the studio. Later, once the attachments recede, they might be allowed back in. 

This exhibition is an exhibition of painting: the process here is on the surface. The marks are worked at, I mean, there is work done so that they might emerge, although that’s never guaranteed.

 My utopia is that there might be marks made without culture, in a completely empty space, but of course that doesn’t mean anything, or rather, that wouldn’t mean anything. Meaning requires some friction, something for the bubbling to catch on. You can sit with the marks, rub your hands over them to ascertain whether their irregularities are painted in, or created by volume, or by reassemblage of outlying parts. You can imagine all sorts of scenarios to play the meaning for this, depending on the context in which your string of metaphors falls. 

If it’s the history of enclosure and expulsion: stripes, penal colonies, immigrants accruing at the border. If it’s pop saccharine candy dots: an extended experimentation around plastic and politics. 

The paintings are sieves: they work on their filtration mechanism. We could call this a more evolved form of epistemology, the map cleaning up our pollution of the territory, but don’t ask me to explain. A cut will do that for me: down the middle of the painting, a third of the way in, a partial circle intersecting another, the accident of the end. To me, these are like autodidacts breathing, strangely the most enabled autodidacts.

Noura Wedell
Benjamin Echeverria was born in 1980 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Pose Falls at Bad Reputation, Los Angeles, 2020; Cups at Parapet Real Humans St Louis, MO, 2020; Six Sculptures at Locker, Los Angeles, CA, 2019; and C.A.R., Green Drawing,Willie Mays, The Terror of Evidence, 3939, No Smoke, Bubbler, Corners Brought to Middle at Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt am Main, 2019.

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Diese Ausstellung wird im Rahmen von Neustart Kultur durch die Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn unterstützt.