BENJAMIN DEGEN

Employing the visual language of drawing, Degen creates a series of paintings that take the viewer on a journey into the artist’s world. Inspired by Eastern and Western aesthetic, philosophical, musical and esoteric traditions, Degen fills his work with a metaphysical aura that visually articulates humanity’s inextricable connection to the...

Degen’s works employ extensive mark-making and fluid touches to describe a human presence. As the paint darts across the canvas or the ink is actively applied on paper, we move through the landscape while the landscape moves through us. Degen’s act of looking becomes a way for us to see ourselves, within a moment, connected to this world.

"I painted these paintings in celebration of human movement. I painted these paintings in a moment of great division. But this is also a moment where we are empowered to make a choice: As a species, we can move together toward collective liberation, or move against each other on a path towards self-annihilation." -Benjamin Degan

"The connections that seemed so clear to me in pictures became cryptic in words and I am only able to understand them through the process of painting. I am hoping that I can share my thoughts informally rather than in essay form. The show title, "Where We Live," alludes to how we, both individually and collectively, inhabit the space around us. Having recently moved out of the city (to the mountains and back) I’ve been examining these ideas from a new perspective." -Benjamin Degen

On the surface, Benjamin Degen is a classic genre painter whose canvases belie the heart of an Abstract Expressionist. His work is built from discrete strokes that resolve into recognizable forms. The layering process Degen employs creates a version of abstraction grounded in both everyday and formal concerns. His are bodies without organs, lacking skeletal structure, pure chroma and medium; yet they are also Matisse and Cézanne’s bathers participating in an age-old tableau and tradition of daily routines.

A hyper-energized mash-up, “THISORGANIZED” presents work which spans genre and me- dium from almost two dozen young, working artists in dialogue. It is a microcosm of a bur- geoning artistic community that is united by individuality of vision—from Chie Fueki’s vivid multi-cultural response to American popular culture, to Benjamin Degen’s heady, psychedelic throwback to Cubism, to the obsessively rendered pen-and-ink drawings of Blaze Lamper to Yuri Masnyj’s singular approach to Still Life in two and three dimensions.