More Great Work by Ben Reeves

My long time buddy and fellow U.B.C. Fine Arts alumni Ben Reeves has just had a very successful show in Toronto at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects. This work represents a virtuoso impressionist influenced splash of colour an texture from Vancouver's painters' painter. I'll leave the rest of the pontificating to this well written review from The Globe and Mail.

Smoke and cream pie: the ultimate cover-up

By GARY MICHAEL DAULT
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Ben Reeves at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects

Painter Ben Reeves seems quite taken with the idea of superimposition. In the case of the painting reproduced here, for example, his Car and Petals, the Vancouver-based artist has very convincingly offered up an image of a tomato-red Volkswagen Beetle, delicately covered with fallen pink Magnolia blossoms. There are two pictorial elements in dialogue, in dynamic equilibrium: one that covers, and one that is covered.

Curiously, though, the artist's winning new exhibition (Smoke, Flowers, Cars) at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects (his first solo show in Toronto) doesn't begin with the artist's determination to cover something with a second something. In fact, you get about half way through it before the impositions begin to happen. The paintings in the first room, which seem only to be about Reeves's exquisite paint handling, are entirely imposition free: That is to say, they are about one thing at a time, and not about two things at once.

Reeves's big Ice Breaker, for example, is just that - a lush, sensuously brushed painting of an ice breaker, negotiating frigid, thickening seas. Why an ice breaker? Who knows? Except that there is something about the ship's hard, hulking form, and the bright, thin sunlight falling all about it, that serves Reeves's purposes well - one of which, at least, is to slather on the oil paint in a way that carves his chosen subject from the canvas's blank space with the kind of exuberant, painterly abandon you don't see much any more. On the wall opposite Ice Breaker, there
is another lushly painted but imposition-free work, called Smoke (Close Up). Like Ice Breaker, it's a painting with a lot of brio - but that's really all. (The atmospheres of other famous paint-handlers, by the way, lurk within its churning field: Willem de Kooning, for example, and Richard Diebenkorn, and even Britain's Frank Auerbach.)

But when you round the corner into the second gallery, past a curiously listless painting called Broadway and Oak (Magnolia) - the only purpose of which may be to introduce the upcoming imposition idea (blossoms fallen on the grass and sidewalk) - you suddenly find yourself in another painterly world: Here, Reeves crackles wildly into life - and immediately proves himself to be a funny, caustic, inventive and highly original painter.

For here, in this second room, imposition reigns supreme. This is where Reeves's smoke paintings are. Three smoke paintings and one cream-pie painting. The four of them are, in fact, nearly obliterated by Reeves's having muffled up the first element of each painting (a portrait) with a second element (smoke, cream). In Smoke 1, Smoke 2 (golfer), and Smoke 3 (girl smoker), the beautifully rendered faces of Reeves's subjects are almost obliterated by the "smoke" - which is made of big, fat, wet-looking globs of grey pigment that the artist has exuberantly and wickedly troweled over the finished painting beneath. In Cream Pie, the same thing has occurred, with globs of "cream" instead of "smoke." This is imposition with a vengeance. And yes, there's a certain slapstick quality to the proceedings (smoking begins to look as silly as being winged with a pie). In the end, though, it is the artist's paint-handling that astonishes. Heavy clouds of "smoke," splatters of "cream pie," it doesn't matter. Reeves has found a way to pile up the paint in such a way that leaves you uncertain whether it's the subject of the painting that counts here, or the way the paint is handled. The balance between the two is brilliant, funny, irritating and disturbing. It's virtuoso stuff.