Martin Bennett
"Martin Bennett" by E. C. Woodley, Summer 2008, p. 94
When Manet cited Raphael in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), he did it by way of an engraving—Marcantonio Raimondi’s reduction of the lost Judgment of Paris—that functioned as a schematic by which Manet brought Raphael back to canvas. Manet’s contemporary Baudelaire found this type of explicit citation too “photographic” to carry on the “memory-structure” of painting.
Martin Bennett’s schematics involve computer-generated black-and-white photocopies that he projects onto canvas and paints. In this way he seems to co-opt both Marcantonio and Manet: copy and recopy. His originals are photos he has taken in places like the grounds of the Villa Borghese (where Raphael’s Deposition of 1507 resides) and Salisbury Cathedral (where he walks when he visits his grandmother). Some of them feature dogs that could, one imagines, be descendants of the animal in the foreground of Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831). Others look like they were borrowed from the Internet. When painted, they appear to map out places in the mind where a memory image might have lain before being called up to consciousness.
For the exhibition “The Geometry Of All Four Seasons,” Bennett has developed and integrated into the memory schematics a delicately painted geometrics he calls “folding volumes.” In each work, the memory image either stands out from the geometric pattern or is submerged into it. The patterning evokes two radical 1914 paintings, David Bomberg’s Vorticist masterpiece In the Hold and Gino Severini’s Spherical Expansion of Light (Centrifugal). In early-modern style, Bennett’s approach suggests the interior workings of “the hidden construction of reality,” as Mondrian’s theosophist inspiration, M. H. J. Schoenmaekers, once wrote.
It is important to note that after this exacting integration of reproduction, representation and abstraction, Bennett sands his thin, all-over surface down until the patterned weave of the gessoed canvas is revealed. This makes the paintings look like progeny of Art & Language’s grainy “snowed on” work Impressionism Returning Sometime in the Future (1984). Bennett’s emphatic stress on the tactile surface of canvas—a traditional painting support—contributes formal and historical content to his work.
Exposing the material beneath the painted surface ultimately grounds the images. I see this technique as a form of honesty that sanctions art history and personal history in the face of what the contemporary mass media has done to images of all kinds. Imagery today provokes a learned distrust of its relation to reality, its absence of material substance. Hal Foster has observed, “If the modernists felt tradition to be an oppressive burden, we are likely to feel it as an unbearable lightness of being.” Bennett compresses these opposing conditions—tradition and its absence—into an alchemy of the matter of fact.
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