“Lynn Valley Days II”, 2018, Oil, acrylic and canvas on burlap
“Late Summer”, 2018, Oil on burlap with acrylic on canvas collage
Three paintings from Ben Reeves’ 2018 exhibition Something Edge at Equinox Gallery in Vancouver. The textures from the layers of paint and canvas, as well as his use of color, create lush dreamlike environments.
From the press release-
Ben Reeves’ artistic practice is a way of exploring and learning about the world as well as a material and intellectual pursuit that unfurls not only new understandings about perception but an equal amount of uncertainty, which in turn fuels further curiosity.
Ruminating on his current series of works, Reeves explains: “These paintings are views from one space, looking into another. I equate this with how experiences are always made up of multiple realities, multiple spaces. For example, the present is always haunted by the past. When I think back to my childhood, growing up here on the West Coast, I realize that it was both the place I thought it was and it wasn’t. I didn’t know that the place I grew up in both was and wasn’t itself.” How, then, does an artist begin to address the layered histories embedded in the land?
In most of Reeves’s paintings, a view is projected from high ground (perhaps a North Shore mountaintop), through a tactile forest (perhaps in Lynn Valley), or toward sights of orderly urban vistas in the distance (perhaps Vancouver). The passage from one space to the other is accentuated by a tangle of vines or hanging branches made of cut canvas, which is collaged directly onto the burlap ground of the painting, partially impeding the view forward. These physical “veils” are staunch reminders of that which hovers behind and within, stalling the viewer in the web of the here and now of the foreground, while the coloured glimmer of an unknown future beckons in the distance. This tension between what is known and what is not, between the fleeting images of memory and the starkness of reality, finds its parallel in paint that is directed with great dexterity by an artist whose multifaceted handling of the medium—as it is blotted, dabbed, and dragged—grows increasingly sophisticated at each reveal.
These works also include the unexpected arrival of the human form. While subdued and somewhat abstracted, figures are seen wading at the seashore or swimming at night in the depths of a wide ocean. Disrupting the Western tradition of horizontality to represent a landscape, Reeves’s incongruously vertical canvases compress the scene from the sides. In works where the horizon is visible, he accentuates this faraway perimeter of the world with a horizontal line placed uncannily near the top of the painting, bringing this unknown edge seemingly closer, opening up possibilities for the scrutiny of infinity or other idealized archetypes. These and other places within Reeves’s paintings can be viewed as “something edge”: locations or thoughts that lie both within and beyond our conception.
