ARTIST STATEMENT
I am an abstract expressionist, color field painter in the lineage of Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. My paintings are non-representational but not strictly abstract, because truly abstract works are perfectly planned, precise, and clear like exercises in logic or geometry. Instead, my work embodies a purely pictorial language in which color, texture, splatter, blot and flow carry aesthetic content, singly and in juxtaposition. The paint or charcoal is thin, glowing with a peculiar translucence that only occasionally appears solid or opaque. I seek out ambiguity, controlled accident and the absence of nuclear areas, leaving the question of what will emerge to the viewer. Since nothing on the canvas remotely resembles conventionally real objects, as the viewer discovers more variations and complexities, relationships among marks alter, foreground and background reverse, supposed objects appear and disappear, planes of perceived depth fluctuate, shaped identities shift and multiply, and the meaning of the work constantly changes. Amid this whirl of experience, one�s primary response is emotional rather than cognitive, though guided by my intention to stimulate an experience of Zenlike formlessness transcending all objectivity.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born and raised in New York City, Frederic Bender began painting in 1959 under the spell of the Abstract Expressionists, who had created entirely new concepts of structure and space. Their work taught Bender to abandon the notion that art should mirror the physical world; to reject the distinction between solid background plane and active foreground form; to embrace automatism and accident, as Dada and Zen painters also had; and to recognize that art, like music, expresses and influences feeling directly.
An analogous determination to understand the world beyond conventional frames of reference led Bender to put painting aside in favor of a forty-year academic career in philosophy. Like his art, Bender's capstone book, The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology (2003), integrates the gestalt theory of perception, Nietzsche, quantum physics, Daoism and Zen into a highly original synthesis, important for understanding his art due to its emphasis on the greater reality of process and relation over substance and structure. Seeking a right-brained complement, Bender began painting again in 2004. His artwork points to the common quest of artist and philosopher for reality beyond the conventional. Like his philosophical work, to fully appreciate Bender's art calls for a deep restructuring of consciousness, as suggested by Andre Breton, who declared that Surrealist art cuts directly through the mental prison of rationally ordered knowledge, and Robert Motherwell, who admitted frankly that abstract art is a form of mysticism. Each of Bender's paintings is a relational whole or gestalt, in which shapes, colors and lines are placed on canvas with the least possible premeditation, which after subsequent modification produce a beautifully complex artistic synthesis, an emotionally and perceptually charged object in which accident, gravity, and the fluid response of paint combine with human gesture to arouse unexpected perceptual and emotional experiences.
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