Zoe Benbow’s new work is based in landscape. An abstract geological landscape developed from direct experience in remote environment. The paintings are evolved from drawings made in situ, yet are as much a meditation on a geology of association and memory as of actual place. The paintings move freely between abstraction and reference, self-containment and randomness, geometry and gesture, weaving a complex aesthetic language which eventually crystalises in a highly resolved picture plane.
The ruptures, ripples and random movements that erupt in the painting process are held in check by a taut structuring of the surface. This ‘frontality’ poses the possibility of a shift in space and structure. What we perceive as foreground can rotate to background and vice versa. The image, tightly balanced, is in continuous flux. Things aren’t always as they first appear and in the shifting nature of the image, the artist throws us headlong into the landscape, surrounding and fusing us to the subject. Our spatial awareness is disrupted and our sense of separateness as witnesses to the environment is challenged.
