Plus and Minus
Robin Rice on Visual Art: Mark Bennion and Alex Roskin at Wexler Gallery
An almost Jungian sense of time and archetypal consciousness links Mark Bennion's paintings and Alex Roskin's sculptural furniture in adjacent spaces at Wexler Gallery. That, and a commitment to the exploration of a singular formal process, seemingly guides each artist's conceptual journey.
The lighting in the gallery is as even and bright as one would expect, but memory recasts Bennion's abstract paintings in a dark setting, illuminated only by firelight or chinks of starlight. A longtime practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism, Bennion uses a self-invented, almost ritualized fresco-related process to construct his paintings. Beginning with a surface of plaster incised with sgraffito markings, he moves through prescribed stages, including crushing the plaster-covered paper before gluing the crackled sheet to wood. Sanding produces a textured, faintly gestural surface that is stained in alternately additive and subtractive processes.
The resulting layered and abraded painting suggests human markings on primordial walls. There's a sense of immediacy and accumulated time; Bennion describes one of his goals in the words of sculptor Isamu Noguchi: "ancient innocence."
Noguchi's furniture might well be an influence on Alex Roskin's graceful, simple, non-functional furniture forms. "Tusk" works, such as a rocking chair, emphasize paired rosewood or oak tusk shapes mounted in brilliantly polished bronze. In "Skeletal" pieces, the curved wooden elements suggest ribs joined to a metal spine.
The curved tusks, in particular, have a historical resonance, stretching back to mastodon tusks through the bull imagery of Crete to the ritual African use and Western collection of trophy elephant tusks. The showy non-functionality of Roskin's tusk objects underlines an opposing reality: Tusks have always been collected as elite or power objects. Now they are relics of human vanity.
Mark Bennion & Alex Roskin | Through Oct. 30, Wexler Gallery, 201 N. Third St., 215-923-7030, wexlergallery.com
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