Informed by dreams and passing visions, misremembered art historical moments, misheard musical fragments, and a pervasive sense of improvisational discovery, Benjamin Styer’s recent paintings expand and deepen the artist’s universe. Working for the past several years in a variety of visual modes and media, all bound to an ever-evolving mythology, the artist finds points of synthesis where geometric projections, ghoulish wanderers, and enchanted musical notes mingle, populating fantastic landscapes and gradated voids. History serves as a source signal for Styer, a devourer of images, folk traditions, and visual tropes; he becomes an interpreter of individual and collective memory, and the uneven terrain connecting the two. Musical motifs are seamlessly made visual, absorbed, and reconstituted throughout the paintings while calligraphy, geometric abstraction, landscape, and surreal vignettes move in step. In the vastness of his world sits a connectivity and pronounced spiritual generosity: with art history, memory, dream, and experience flattened and disrupted, the door to Styer’s thrillingly singular universe creaks open.
[excerpted from Moskowitz Bayse gallery: www.moskowitzbayse.com]