Benjamin Klein

My 11-year-old daughter points out a coiled snarl of slick lines immersed in the surface of Striker, 2018, one of Benjamin Klein’s pieces in his recent exhibition at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain. Klein’s works proffer a parade of zoomorphic imagery, animistic characters that emerge and recede repeatedly throughout the works here, all contained within a landscape motif that the painter uses as a metaphoric arena for painterly investigation.

My daughter points out more spiders in the matrices of other works. After a while I make a point of looking for them, as well as other hidden creatures, but since my personal phobias have evolved with age to embody more abstract existential threats, my thought is that I may, like her, be projecting my own pervasive sense of dread onto Klein’s paintings, much as my daughter keeps seeing crawly things that torture her at night.

The spider in Striker is echoed in the gnarl of riparian vegetation at the edge of an acidic pond. A pod-like character who re-emerges in other pieces only partially materializes, enough to echo the embedded spider, as if realizing it has made an embarrassing and premature entrance. Central to the image is a recurring motif that often presents itself in different forms throughout the exhibition: an animistic character acting as an embodiment for either the viewer or the painter himself—in this case, a swan-like animal, which is represented in this painting, as well as in Shifter, 2018, and Hunter, 2018, swimming in an acidic pond.

Hunting, seeking and navigating seem to be the main occupations of these characters, and an embodiment of an undefined spiritual search is referenced in the nature of the titles: Tracker, Striker, Navigator, Devourer, Scout.

In all the works, a Doig-like pastoral provides an arena for emergent characters: abruptly articulated skies, densely overworked vegetation and an overall colour sense that tends toward the hallucinatory. Klein’s works conjure storybook illustration, with an inclination for the fantastic quite beyond the usual confines of an empathetic painterly sensibility, more accurately providing a field of chromatic and textural fertility from where figures emerge and embody a potential action. Step back from Striker, and other animistic figures subtly emerge and interact in their own distinctly Kleinian ecosystem.

The works share a kinship with Doig, Henri Rousseau or Odilon Redon, painters for whom the landscape is more an arena of an embellished artificiality than a strict contemplation of sensory input from the outside world. From there, the beasts and pests of a more classical interiority struggle gently for dominance, and clues to painterly concerns emerge, suggesting but never completing the story, eventually dissembling into a non sequitur. In painting, as in life, there is no there there.

In Navigator, as well as Tracker and Sneaker (all 2018), a pod-like turtle creature crawls out of a fertile bed of muck and flora, pausing before a densely painted forest below a riotous canopy of star-like orbs, which slowly assert themselves as faces, animals or spidery constellations. One character—huddled, shelled and poised to enter the scene—seems a hesitant participant in the painting. Its soft shell is both protection and integration, and the character (like the entrance figure in classical motifs) seems a personification of both the viewer and the painter, engaging with, and at the same time being bewildered by, the world around him. He navigates the stars much as the viewer reads the surface, or the painter reacts to the logic of the work while making it.

As tempting as it is to lock onto a narrative in Klein’s work—or look for spiders—some of the more disjointed, accidental works more properly defy a reading, and guide the viewer away from the arena of imagery in order to revel in the quality of the paint and the contrasting surface qualities of the piece. Diver (éclaircie pastorale), 2018, is a smorgasbord of Kleinian motifs, where characters from other works re-emerge, and the painter manipulates the surface more explicitly. Éclaircie is translated roughly as a brief sunny interval between cloud cover. Reflecting the rift of complementary colours at the centre of the work (éclaircie can also be a rift), the sun more crudely pours into the centre from the upper right, as meta-characters reveal themselves through zoomorphic shapes, sometimes fully articulated, at other times barely perceptible. The sense of a story—in almost all of Klein’s works—is reinforced and invited by a solitary character looking into the picture frame: in this case, a squirrel, gazing on a more riotous and disjointed world. Elsewhere, fish swim out of clouds, fauna pops out of flora. Spiders.

Another piece that seems a modified version of the éclaircie motif is Caller, 2018. An area of clear colour is centrally located, a clearing beyond a large thicket of densely clustered, thorny black impasto. A blue sock-puppet-like giraffe pops his head up as a candidate for the “caller,” but what attracts is the thicket: dark and intricately woven, riddled with receding and emerging hallucinatory potentiality, like an embedded tiger staring at you from a Rousseau jungle tableau. It calls you to come and play. As a viewer in most of Klein’s works, you are “called” to embed yourself freely in the painterly matrix of imagery. It’s what looks back at you that you should worry about. ❚

“Shifter Bender Striker” was exhibited at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, Montreal, from May 10 to June 16, 2018.

Cameron Skene is a Canadian painter and writer based in Montreal.