Scott Livesey Galleries - Jason Benjamin - 2012

JASONBENJAMIN POST HISTORY

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The sun is down and ‘Micalago’ is at rest

Like Chinese silk of faded gold, the grass and all the hills like breasts of turtle-doves My soul could find a home ‘midst blades of grass And get its music from the whispering trees These pleasant little hills that lure us on To ride and ride until we reach beyond.

George W. Lambert

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JASON BENJAMIN POST HISTORY

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JASON BENJAMIN

Scott Livesey Galleries

Silk of Faded Gold

BY ASHLEY CRAWFORD Jason Benjamin climbs out of his swag and wastes no time getting to work. The light is right, bleached in that post-dawn way that casts strange and surreal shadows. During the course of the long solo day those shadows creep across the plains, shuddering as the clouds distort the light, which eventually succumbs to a blaze of blood-red glory.

The artist doesn’t move a great deal on these sojourns. He doesn’t have to. The world moves for him, playing its tricks of hue within the natural chiaroscuro of the granite outcrops of the Monaro region of South Eastern New South Wales.

The last time I had seen Benjamin was over ten years ago on an extraordinary trip to Lake Eyre and the Australian centre with such fellow artists as Tim Storrier, David Larwill and Rodney Pople. We were all drunk on the landscape (and, to be honest, drunk in that other way that forms amazing camaraderie). Benjamin’s almost obsessive love of the landscape was in abundant proof, but back then, it was captured via the lens of his camera before being rendered onto canvas back in his Sydney studio.

Things have changed over that decade. Benjamin himself has taken on a more rugged and weathered appearance and his work has done the same. He now resembles a character from the novels of one of his favourite authors, Cormac McCarthy and, again, his work has taken on some of the harsh flavour of McCarthy’s writing. Gone is the more European palette of earlier works, replaced by the more stark hues of the Australian outback, as can be so hauntingly witnessed in the distant but menacing fire in such paintings as Now And Forever.

Robert Hughes once famously – and accurately – commented that when Europeans discovered America they discovered freedom, but when Europeans made it to the Antipodes they found a prison.

Something of this bleak assessment has found its way into the core of the history of Australian art, from the doom-laden works of John Glover in the Colonial days to the bleak surrealist impulses of the Angry Penguins through to the more contemporary sense of the apocalyptic seen in the works of Peter Booth and Philip Hunter and in George Miller’s Mad Max. Beneath Benjamin’s rain-laden thunderclouds lies the cruel irony of the land of drought. The eucalypts stand as talismans of deprivation, the granite boulders the headstones of a dying world. Benjamin captures the strange tricks of light that are seen nowhere else on the planet, the way that sunlight carves through the clouds creating an eerie sense of simultaneous movement and stillness, the gentle eddies of air captured by the soaring eagles, hawks and crows that so often appear stationary mid-air, their cries piercing the sky.

Best known for his monumental works on canvas, it is Jason Benjamin’s rarely exhibited and extremely intimate works on paper that reveal a technical adroitness all too rarely seen in contemporary Australian art.

A part of this revelation stems from Benjamin being invited to undertake an ongoing artists’ residency at the Australian Museum in Sydney. Sitting in the Director’s office she asked him what he might like to tackle. Benjamin had no idea. And in that moment of blankness he spied upon her walls the taxidermed bird. There was the mission; to bring these literally stuffed animals to life and the result recalls the fastidious line work of Albrecht Dürer.

But Benjamin did not choose his creatures at random, specifically selecting only the creatures that inhabit the locale where the paintings reside. “Portraits of the residents so to speak,” Benjamin says.

The resurrectionist in Benjamin went to work. The dull glass eyes took on character and mischievousness and, at times, malevolence as can be clearly seen in the Yes said the sky series. The dull feathers and marsupial fur took on a glisten and shine. They came alive.

POST HISTORY

Something similar was occurring in the landscape. Where once the imagery had been caught on film, it was now captured by the lead of the pencil, in the process torturing the surface of the paper until the works take on the look and feel of imagery from a far previous century. Indeed, they take on something of the hue and texture of a prose description of the Australian landscape by George W. Lambert (1873-1930) “The sun is down and ‘Micalago’ is at rest Like Chinese silk of faded gold, the grass…”

Australian Ghosts recall ancient parchment, indeed, like silk of faded gold and perhaps not surprisingly another influence on Benjamin was the Australian artist Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) with whom Benjamin spent time with and painted a portrait of in 1997. The two artists could not be more different in technical approach, but both endeavour, and succeed in capturing the wilful atmospherics of the land.

In the last ten years it seems that Jason Benjamin has travelled the extremes, physically, psychologically and aesthetically. This is, without a doubt, his most powerful body of work to date. The future beckons, harsh, unruly but without doubt beatifically.

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Can We Stay Here Forever ?

2011 - 2012

Oil on linen 120 x 120 cm 10

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We’re Home Now

2011 - 2012

Oil on linen 120 x 80 cm 12

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Post History

2011

Oil on linen 180 x 180 cm 14

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The Members Stand

2010 - 2011

Oil on linen 110 x 80 cm 16

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Now And Forever

2011

Oil on linen 120 x 120 cm 18

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The Waiting Garden

2011

Oil on linen 180 x 180 cm 20

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Can You Stay Here Next To Me?

2011

Oil on linen 120 x 120 cm 22

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We Carry Each Other

2011

Oil on linen 120 x 80 cm 24

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She Sings To Me

2011

Oil on linen 120 x 120 cm 26

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Boulevard Of Dreams

Me and Albert Tucker

Australian Ghosts (VII) 2011 2011

Oil on linen

PENCIL AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER

66 x 66 cm - (each) 28

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25 x 25 cm

Australian Ghosts (XV)

2011

PENCIL AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER 25 X 65.5 cm

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Yes said the sky (V)

Yes said the sky (X)

2011

2011

PENCIL AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER 25 X 33 cm

PENCIL AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER 32

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25 X 33 cm

Yes said the sky (XVI)

Yes said the sky (VII)

2011

2011

PENCIL AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER 25 X 33 cm

PENCIL AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER 34

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25 X 33 cm

Yes said the sky (IX)

Yes said the sky (IV)

2011

2011

PENCIL AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER 25 X 33 cm

PENCIL AND WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER 36

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25 X 33 cm

JASON BENJAMIN POST HISTORY

SCOTT LIVESEY GALLERIES 909 A High Street Armadale VIC 3143 Phone:

+61 3 98247770

www.scottliveseygalleries.com

Acknowledgements Melissa Amore Ashley Crawford Ian Barry Plug2Studio

Catalogue compiled by Scott Livesey & Sophie Foley ISBN 978-0-9806402-4-3 This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

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