NIGHT PAINTINGS by PAUL BENNEY
The Deadhouse
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| Levitation 2005 Oil on wood (c) Paul Benney |
Beneath Somerset House’s famous
neo-classical courtyard - used for film sets,
fashion shows and as a glamorous skating venue in the winter – lies a web of little-known
underground passageways called the Deadhouse.
You could hardly ask for a better setting for these strange paintings. It’s an unsettling space, dingy,
crooked, with headstones hung on the walls grabbing your attention with tragic true stories. The corridor
is punctuated by rows of alcoves each about the size of a large pantry. Part of the site is said to be under the River Thames itself.
Paul Benney is now showing the
first exhibition of paintings ever to be held there. He writes ‘I don’t set out to
make eerie or unsettling work. It does eventually come across as that, I
think, as a coincidence, as a result of me finding imagery that makes sense to
me’.
Benney is influenced by the Symbolists who believed that, because you can’t
confront absolute truths head on, the artist must ‘tell it slant’. That way, art can embody something of our spiritual quest. Rachel Campbell Johnston
of the Times writes that Benney ‘shows us our lives as they balance on that
fragile boundary between the perfectly ordinary and the profoundly
otherworldly. He seeks to capture that mystery which redeems us from the
mundane’.
In Levitation it's as if we're looking through a window at a figure
furled up as a foetus, suspended in some magical space. It reminds me of Salvador Dali’s Crucifixtion.
In both paintings the subject is oblivious of us, both figures, caught
in eye-catching postures, are suspended between alternative universes.
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| Christ of St John of the Cross 1951 S.Dali |
Benney is quoted as saying he has ‘a holy horror of slick
paintings. His influences range from 20th century Russian cinema to Rembrandt and
Goya. ‘Generally, of all those artists I am drawn to the subterranean subject
matter. That includes Goya’s Black
Paintings’, which include Saturn devouring his son
and two ghoulish old men eating soup. I find some of Benney’s work equally disturbing; Pissing Death, a skeleton standing ankle deep in a Romantic mist-swathed lake, pissing into
the water; and Black Varla, a head which bursts into flames, not fire descending from heaven
as in the Pentecost story but seeming to escape from the man himself as it his very
forehead has caught fire.
While I appreciate Benney’s sense of adventure and his dislike of the
mundane, I think he has a harder task than the Symbolists had when they burst in on the
world to shock and to shake. We can now have daily access to terrible visual and word images.
What I appreciate most are Benney's skill in creating an atmosphere - and the beautiful way he paints. Look at the upper half of Levitation. Who
would not want to plunge into the jades and turquoises and silver which are so absolutely present before us? Waves or clouds, plunging or rising, they welcome us. Or perhaps they greet us with perfect calm and stillness and silence - and we're back with the Symbolists' spiritual quest?
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