Otherworldly riverine landscapes unfold beneath green clouds, and uncanny caverns are dotted with cotton candy-like shrubs in the surreal oil paintings of Gabe Benzur. With color forefront in his mind, the Brooklyn-based artist’s compositions teeter between representation and imagination.
Benzur begins by creating scenes digitally, then transfers the renderings into drawings, followed by canvases. “I use a pretty old version of Midjourney because it doesn’t know how to get the right answer,” he tells Colossal. “I like surprises.” Then, he transfers multiple images into Illustrator, where he makes crude collages and reassembles the imagery until it begins to resonate with a composition that feels right.
Billowing clouds, mountains, and calderas are rendered in distinctive palettes, some of which are more fantastical than others. Works like “Uni” and “Menrva” evoke the transcendental landscapes of Agnes Pelton, while pieces like “Orcus” and “Mania” take on an almost cartoonish quality in their melting, sticky formations that play with our impressions of reality.
Benzur is influenced by places he’s been or read about while also incorporating elements of cartoons, the supernatural, mythology, memories, anatomy, and more. “I follow no specific visual lineage,” he says. “I am trying to capture what I see in my head omnivorously to create a world in which I want to exist.”
Ancient Etruscan mythology is something of a metaphorical foothold for his imagination, as he considers how pre-scientific societies interpreted inexplicable natural phenomena, such as “attributing anything unexplainable to the acts of the gods,” he says. To someone confronted by something out in the wild that they’ve never experience before, be it a lenticular cloud or a shooting star, there is a sense of awestruck wonder and “blank slate curiosity” that Benzur relishes. “The sky or a hill or a river could be a god,” he says.
A few of Benzur’s pieces are currently on view in The Invisible Dog Goes for a Walk at Hashimoto Contemporary, which continues through February 7 in New York City. Find more on the artist’s Instagram.
