Paintings Are Quiet | Ben Simon
Curator: Avner Levinson
Maya Gallery, 5/10/23-28/10/23
Text: Ben Simon

Quiet is a kind of maturity. Energy is there, but rumbling under the surface. Electricity is quiet. Quiet static energy.

"Paintings are Quiet" is an exhibition of restraint and life's energy in quiet motifs. The motif or device is figures in familiar quiet places and positions, which is attractive. The narrative usually begged of figurative work that is not academic, is left to the viewer. Tension and energy, the essential ingredients for art, are generated with special blends of color, poses, and shapes, some of the fundamental tools used in the job and joy of painting. The energy then promotes what?

Style, like in early Modern painting, where the roots of this art form are, is the artist's message in the work. Stylistic choices, the more interesting and personal choices in a world of infinite inspiration, disclose the intention and character of the artist.

Distractions of the image-driven internet are incredible. However, on the internet, the innumerable styles chosen for mostly splashy or snapshot images, to document something, sell something or illustrate something are not the something. In these kinds of images, the something is the vacation depicted, or the product or the sunset over the sea or the meal, whereas paintings are the something in of themselves. In painting, not illustration, the style is the message.

Figurative painting has the longest history of any history possibly, in cave paintings. Since then, the styles of representation we are privileged to see, are all over the map now especially, from Japan to Holland, so much more so than in Van Gogh's time. How do we understand that each of these styles is as important as the other to represent the human relationship to figures? We need all of those styles and more to represent ourselves accurately. We are more than bowls of fruit. (Of course, people who paint bowls of fruit come from Japan and Holland too, and they make stylistic choices, but fruit are not found in cave paintings so less relevant.)

Modern art makes clear that the artist and not the image is on display. The human choices of what and how to paint are where the interest is, less so the representation which is well accomplished with a camera.

The technique, different than style, in the case of "Paintings Are Quiet," is observable here in texture. It is the record of the artist's hand correcting mistakes skinned over and drying, staring them in the face. There might not have been time to make the correction, and the French ultramarine blue tube was empty, so the mistake, like a frozen frustration, adds to the lumps and bumps in the document. This too is personal, but it is not as much choice as it is the nature of working. Sometimes, an artist runs out of blue. Texture is the organic result, and style is the inorganic or contemplative result, coming together to represent human nature in the art.

The paintings are a record of life lived between brushstrokes and a mind alive with style and thought. The energy, bottled and restrained, represents a kind of life and is the meaning of this art.