Painting in Tongues
The opening spread from “Painting in Tongues,” David Jager’s look at Vancouver painter Ben Reeves, from the Canadian Art Summer 2008 edition.
The painting tradition seldom accommodates painting that deliberately undermines itself. Most efforts in which an artistic medium addresses its own underpinnings leave us cold. Analysis and deconstruction, after all, are interpretive acts generally applied to a completed work, not part of the creative process.
What happens then when an artist adopts such a critical stance while working, after a fashion, in the tradition of realism? Ben Reeves is a Vancouver artist who makes representational paintings that are also deliberate attempts to provoke and unsettle our cultural assumptions about representation. He addresses the brush stroke as a signifier of assumed and potential meaning without ever fully renouncing the claims or even the pleasures of traditional representation. He raises questions about the authenticity of imagery and the semantics of representation and perception. Most importantly, he examines the transformation of paint from inert matter to image. Reeves’s process is an ongoing attempt to convey the essence of painting through painting.
The result is a growing body of work that is actively engaged with the theory of painting while remaining deceptively traditional. At first glance, many of his works appear to borrow generously from 19th-century realism. Yet they are often meticulously conceptual. Reeves is evidently fascinated by the objects and people he paints, and he paints them very well, but in examining his practice we see that his true fascination is with the meaning and function of painting. Reeves never forgets that painting is always about a smear of pigment on a surface, a mark that gathers all manner of meaning about itself immediately upon being made.
In an artist statement he writes:
My work isolates and draws these marks out of their original context to explore ways that meaning precipitates around the physical substance of paint. A tension emerges between inert blobs of paint and their referents….The gestures are all the more meaningful and (as loci of such tremendous drama) all the more absurd as a result.
For Reeves, the brush stroke is where this precipitation begins. As both a calculated and an unconscious gesture, the brush stroke bears the imprint of intention and habit. It is the starting point of a system of signification that grows to include what Reeves sees as mythologies of representation and artistry that shape the narrative of art history.
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