from Friday's Times,
Steve DiBenedetto
Steve DiBenedetto, whose hideously beautiful, semiabstract painting has taken a quantum leap forward with each successive exhibition, here presents a new series of colored pencil drawings, adding ann exciting new chapter to his evolution.
Even more so than his paintings, Mr. Dibenedetto's drawings have an eccentric, Outsideresque quality. Imagine a Vietnam War veteran with a history of psychedelic drug consumption who finds in drawing a way to exorcise his demons. That's the impression conveyed by Mr. DiBenedetto's seemingly obsessive patterning around recurring images of helicopters and octopuses. Viewed from a distance, the drawings have and episodic structure that calls to mind comic book illustration, and the surfaces have the jewel-like luminosity of medieval manuscript illumination.
Up close, one finds that the artist has constructed these surfaces with intense care, each different area given it's own distinctively inventive application of mark-making and richly layered color. It is gratifying just to pore over this continually surprising topography. In places it looks like randomly improvised doodling, but often the patterning supports the overall picture.
Made with carefully inscribed short marks, the shimmering pie sections of a large disc represent the high-speed revolutions of helicopter rotors; zebra-stripe patterning in the sky suggests screaming noise' tiny gnarly marks swarm over the skin of a red octopus. All of this serves to energize the larger vision - a war between the reptilian id and the technorational ego. Call it "Apocalypse Now."
KEN JOHNSON
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Steve DiBenedetto
Steve DiBenedetto, whose hideously beautiful, semiabstract painting has taken a quantum leap forward with each successive exhibition, here presents a new series of colored pencil drawings, adding ann exciting new chapter to his evolution.
Even more so than his paintings, Mr. Dibenedetto's drawings have an eccentric, Outsideresque quality. Imagine a Vietnam War veteran with a history of psychedelic drug consumption who finds in drawing a way to exorcise his demons. That's the impression conveyed by Mr. DiBenedetto's seemingly obsessive patterning around recurring images of helicopters and octopuses. Viewed from a distance, the drawings have and episodic structure that calls to mind comic book illustration, and the surfaces have the jewel-like luminosity of medieval manuscript illumination.
Up close, one finds that the artist has constructed these surfaces with intense care, each different area given it's own distinctively inventive application of mark-making and richly layered color. It is gratifying just to pore over this continually surprising topography. In places it looks like randomly improvised doodling, but often the patterning supports the overall picture.
Made with carefully inscribed short marks, the shimmering pie sections of a large disc represent the high-speed revolutions of helicopter rotors; zebra-stripe patterning in the sky suggests screaming noise' tiny gnarly marks swarm over the skin of a red octopus. All of this serves to energize the larger vision - a war between the reptilian id and the technorational ego. Call it "Apocalypse Now."
KEN JOHNSON
- steve 11-07-2002 8:23 am