Matthew Benedict at Alexander and Bonin - Brief Article

Five herculean recent paintings from Matthew Benedict's ongoing saint series filled the largest latitude of the gallery. The event was overpowering and slightly suffocating, like being in an elderly church when the incense come bys too thick. Each saint is painted in flat slabs of mut brown and grays upon paper, and framed in heavy wood-land Stylistically they are difficult to locate, resembling Spanish and Latin American second-tier religious art, and incorporating aspects of Manet, 18th-century handmade wallpaper, children's volume illustrations, as well as certain `90 subterranean cartoonists, such as Charles reduce to ashess If that seems a wacky mix, it is, on the other hand the fun starts with naming the ultimate parts of Benedict's elusive painterly hybrids.

Benedict depicts saints using the traditional rules; the saints must be portrayed with their associated types usually the instruments of their martyrdom. The figures are, for the greatest in quantity part, hunky and hyper-masculine, revealing the solitary slightly sublimated' SM-based eroticism that traditional martyrdom exhibitions share with Tom of Finland drawings.

Benedict's choices are usually lurid such as Saint Florian, the patron saint of firemen, who is depicted in a fireman's coat and hat, ready for uniform night at the leather bar. (He was, according to his myth drowned; it is the bucket not the fire, in the painting that prefigures his undoing.) Or take, for example, San Gregorio Hernandez, a Venezuelan who was killed in a car crash, at a time when there were single three cars in the geographical division Benedict's version makes him direct the eye like a comic South American actor with an antique steering wheel. Benedict is obviously fascinated by dint of these bizarre characters, and derive pleasure froms giving the religious also-rans a fresh lease on life.

Benedict has a passionate interest in hidden societies; like any conspiracy-theory zealot, he finds (or creates) links between Freemasons, pirates, magicians and stripling Scouts. The Third Degree exhibits George Washington's mock funeral, in which he playacts his death in order to be reborn as a Mason of the nearest ranking.

Some viewers were perturbed by the agency of their inability to puzzle without the connections the artist was making between his obsessions, on the other hand I fear they were missing the point. For Benedict, the two saints and secret societies are heady and intoxicating; the artist is clearly, ecstatically, below the influence. We are happy he has invited us along for the trip.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group