Benjamin Klein

The trippy whimsy of Benjamin Klein’s paintings can overwhelm at first. Strawberries, ladybugs, cute—if haunted—animals, radioactive skies, cartoon planets, clamouring hues and faux-naïf brushwork abound in the Canadian-American artist’s canvases, producing a kind of ocular and thematic assault. Give them some time, though—a second, third, even fourth glance— and the evidence of a wry, eccentric sophistication emerges, settling the ostensibly ludicrous subject matter into the plausible cast of a painterly dreamworld.

The eight works in this exhibition span more than a decade but hang together as a suite, an almost episodic exploration of Klein’s imaginary. One of the earliest, dating from Klein’s days in the MFA program at the University of Guelph, Nightlight (so you won’t be afraid), 2013, features an enormous, somewhat schematic ladybug that seems to glow from within. The cobalt blue dots on its bulbous carapace fly off to punctuate the brambly undergrowth in which it is suspended upside down. In Recharger/Devourer, 2018, a turtle’s shell—or is it a morel or a wonkily organic geodesic dome—rests in strawberry fields in front of a forest, its compartmentalized surface picked out by the raking gloam. The painted scene reads bucolic enough, save for the fact that the foreground strawberries cast what appear to be drop shadows, leading the whole to evoke an otherworldly vision a little less and a Photoshopped composite a little more.

These early works establish Klein’s approach, which continues to undergird his practice. On the one hand, he essays an idiosyncratic nature-based mysticism, in which things morph into other things with the ease of objects in a dream, and the consistency with which he has pursued this suggests a certain sincerity to the endeavour. On the other hand, he continually undermines both the mystification and his sincerity by allowing his oneiric universe to include things so jarringly off, so wrong—monstrous ladybug as lightbulb, strawberries thrown into relief by an overzealous flash—that the paintings’ own internal incongruity breaks the spell he casts.

At their best, Klein’s paintings balance these opposing forces, holding them in a tension that engenders a push and pull between hallucinatory visions and a pointed exposure of the visions’ transparent artifice. His most satisfying works evince a horror vacui, resulting in all-over compositions that fill the available space. All Through the Night, 2015, delineates a cosmos explosive with incident, a tomato-red ringed planet surrounded by a multitude of other orbs, concentric rings, bursts and more gaseous forms oscillating in every inch of the ample canvas, nearly six feet wide. Lacking any pretence to pictorial or technical refinement, the painting might appear unschooled or juvenile, yet Klein’s gestural brushwork creates its own unearthly luminosity, as if it were fluorescing under a black light, as well as a sense of movement that feels musical in its complex of rhythms and counterpoints. It is not Mondrian’s boogie-woogie, though, but rather something more akin to the neo-psychedelic camp of Deee-Lite’s 1990 bop “Groove Is in the Heart.” The dance party’s raucousness dampens only in the lower right corner of the painting, where an easily overlooked web of black tendrils and a dark buckyball—or a turtle’s shell, etc.—encroach.

Sitter, 2025, performs a similar feat. Here, a rainbow-hued toucan perches on a knobby branch in front of a nocturnal sky bursting with fireworks—or night-blooming asters—like celestial portents. The bird’s empty staring eye reflects the full moon. Yet just below, burnt debris rides atop a bed of molten lava that stretches to the horizon. Like an acid trip on the cusp of turning (“as milk does,” to paraphrase Roland Barthes), Klein’s work often includes signs of something ominous, indications that do not necessarily disrupt our art-induced reveries but remind us that they might end badly. Et in Arcadia ego.

In Ray of Hope, 2025, a stream flows from between two hills, through a meadow alternately scrubby and blossoming with wildflowers, to fall down over a strawberry patch into a rippled pond. Two spectral waterbirds with pink heads, sharp beaks, long spotted necks and multicoloured plumage paddle there, one peering at a ladybug that crawls among blades of grass formed by long, liquid, sensuous, single strokes of green. A large ghost-eyed snail stands sentinel above, while, in the distance, what must be a gargantuan green giraffe, with yellow polka dots that match its baleful blank eyes, raises its head between the hills, a Muppet Titan sending vaporous eddies across the sunset. An engagingly enigmatic tour de force, with cameo appearances by a number of the artist’s themes and motifs, Ray of Hope seems to summarize Klein’s visionary world making, equal parts ridiculousness and wonder.

This is not to say, however, that he hits it out of the park every time. A couple of works in the exhibition function as character studies more than glimpses into Klein’s hermetic realm and, lacking that realm’s internal logic, miss out on its equivocal magic. On a hillock under a red sky sprinkled with confetti shed by the green sun in Torch, 2025, a cerulean coyote looks over its shoulder while oversized ladybugs crawl underfoot. In Faafo, 2025, a huge blue mouse stands on a grassy tuffet in the middle of the sea and sniffs up at a black spider dangling by a thread from the planet Saturn. A shark circles, visible only as a dotted fin. Both of these paintings veer uncomfortably close to the outsider-y kitsch of George Rodrigue’s blue dogs, their fall from grace pointing up the risk of the tightrope that the artist walks so successfully in other works. While giving us every reason not to, Klein makes us want to believe, if not in the worlds he limns per se, at least in the power of oil on canvas to transport us somewhere. ❚

“Benjamin Klein: Sentinels and Satellites” was exhibited at Tappeto Volante Projects, Brooklyn, New York, from April 9, 2025, to May 18, 2025.

Joseph R Wolin is a critic and curator in New York and a consulting curator and editor at the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College. He teaches in the MFA in photography program at Parsons School of Design, The New School, in New York.