Allan Bennetts: Popular Electronics

About

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Popular Electronics, Allan Bennetts’ first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition consists of new oil paintings depicting consumer and trade specific electronic devices, on view in the east garden gallery March 5 - February 16, 2022.

In this exhibition, Bennetts’ presents labor intensive still life paintings of vintage consumer products. Painted from direct observation, the paintings examine the varied positions consumer technologies occupy our collective and individual perception. By rebuilding these products as paintings, Bennetts moves the objects further from their former utilitarian function, shifting them into a new category of commodity.

Bennetts’ paintings of objects share ideas with such artists as René Magritte, Giorgio Morandi, and Vija Celmins. Painted against neutral backgrounds, the carefulness of which they are made imbues them with a sympathetic humanity; awkward and silent. Exceedingly complex in organization, each painting poses varied positions the rendered object occupies in both collective and individual perception. The paintings are then elevated to a sense of timelessness, where the dimensionality depicted is in contrast to the flat picture plane. 

It is not a coincidence, that the rhetoric of a media driven society that influences every aspect of social life, including the arts, the preference for making paintings devoid of ideological and celebratory content is at the core of artist’s autonomy. From this perspective, the paintings emerge from a metaphysical space where the artist's poetic search grasps the profound through representational forms. The result is an accumulation of calibrated objects and shadows imbued with a broad cultural understanding and comprehensive knowledge of the tradition of painting. 

Allan Bennetts artworks take cues from painting traditions while simultaneously engaging in concepts inspired by contemporary pursuits. His laboriously detailed oil paintings depict common and trade specific electronics with a carefulness that imbues each object with a sympathetic humanity. Bennetts graduated from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI and Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. He has exhibited his work at venues such as Miles McEnery Gallery, New York; Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, Forum Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI, and Miles McEnery, New York, NY. Bennetts is the recipient of 2019 Museum Purchase Award Nominee, Cranbrook Museum Of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI.