John Baldessari. Pollock/Benton

About

In the current exhibition Pollock/Benton, the artist expands on this practice and inquiry in to painting, concentrating on two pivotal figures from the expressly American tradition: one the regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, and the other, the Abstract Expressionist master and Benton’s protégé, Jackson Pollock. Examining nodes of influence between the two, he seeks a new “intermediate space” revealing in the interstices of overlaps, intersections, and blank spaces of the work a complex legacy of correspondence and contrast. The insertion of blank spaces have their antecedent in the geometric erasure found in Baldessari’s works from the 1970’s to the 1990’s and serve as a tabula rasa for a new narrative, in which editing and removal and the purposeful overpainting of an image is a means for voiding old fragments into newly constructed combinations. Pairing images with incongruous texts from everyday life –“ Normal”, “Daily”, “Routine”, “Balanced”, “Ordinary”, Typical”, Pollock/ Benton reiterates the paradox of montage and assembly at the heart of his practice, placing disparate fragments together and offering the viewer the opportunity to create a new composite.