John Yau at Hyperallergic:
Steve DiBenedetto, who began exhibiting in the 1980s, has become one of the best painters of his generation. A bundle of contradictions, restlessly moving between figuration and abstraction, he loves to push the paint around in his work — adding, scraping, changing — as he seeks links between the body and visionary states. The otherworldliness we encounter in his work is comic and unnerving, the perfect combination for these upside-down times.
The title of his current exhibition at Derek Eller, Spiral Architect, brings together two of his ongoing preoccupations — a line that winds around a center and the designer of a functional environment. Together, they underscore DiBenedetto’s conception of a painting as a search for a functional structure, a talisman that can aid viewers amid our collective sense of traumatic crisis. In contrast to artists such as Hilma af Klint and Forrest Bess, who believed they were conduits transmitting messages from a higher power, DiBenedetto wants to unlock the viewer’s own psychic unconsciousness and tap into the mind’s capacity for attaining visionary states. In this way, he is constantly reaching toward a cosmic sense of the absurd.
more here.
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