The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
In this recent exhibition, Gordon Bennett presented ten regular canvases with repetitive rhythms. They are seductive and painterly, decorative and familiar. Camouflage patterns engulf and deform the figurative component of the works. The camouflage pattern employed in a multiplicity of colours, tones and patterns for the purpose of conducting warfare is an emblem of modernity. Such patterns employ the logic of modern abstraction to disguise form in a distortion of vision.
In Figure/Ground (Zero), Bennett is concerned with vision which has been subjected to distorting effects, from which objective detachment has been lost. He includes a figure in a gas mask and a portrait image of Saddam Hussein—ambiguous icons of fear. These images are subjected to repetition and eventual deformity and collapse. As contemporary icons they exist in a distorted social and symbolic order. They are invoked with a hallucinogenic quality in an unreal landscape of hypereal media images.
Bennett addresses the figure/ground relationship as a problem which structures the visible in painting and culture, as a binary construct which conditions culture and history. The ground is a formless place of emergence from which the figure must distinguish itself—whole, autonomous, distinct and present. This relationship constructs visibility and representation through the tropes of human/inhuman, knowledge/nonknowledge, and form/formless. The visibility of the other is subject to dualisms—light/darkness, positive/negative, presence/absence and seen/unseen.
The exhibition includes four paintings of an anonymous figure disguised by a gasmask. This image lacks uniqueness and individual features as it functions as a faceless abstraction. The gasmask can be seen as a symbol of terror—it is an icon of the war on terror. There is an ambiguity and uncertainty about this figure. The dualistic logic of the war