Will Benedict (b. 1978, Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in Vienna) is a versatile artist, who uses different media to create hybrid and complex images and installations that have been defined as “picture in the picture”. After making a name for himself in 2008 with the series Post Card – out-and-out post cards with address, scratched notes and short ironic messages, where small paintings turned into a kind of stamp –, Benedict focuses on various combinations of gouache paintings and cut-out studio portraits, glued and mounted on foam core panels and aluminum frames. Pro Choice (2010), Black Friday (2012) or Bonjour Tourist (2012), are just some examples of his unusual and hardly contextualizable compositions, that represent people, friends and models: they were asked to pose in front of paintings and photographed alone or in couples, seating behind a table or office desk, having dinner, reading the newspaper, smoking, or gazing at each other.
Benedict then prints the photographs life-size, cuts and glues them to the original foam core panel, creating visual hypertexts, in which the background paintings looks like windows overlooking weird landscapes. Building numerous and different layers of reading, the artist faces contemporary issues – from the global tourism to the broadcast journalism, passing through the social networking –, going beyond the established conception of painting, exploring its nature to combine and overlay different media.
Describing his current show at Halle Für Kunst, entitled TV Dinner: The Narcissism of Minor Differences, Mr. Benedict says: “A slight breeze rustles through wheat fields while bright yellow women look into tiny pots. Things are the same but different. You can’t see radioactivity. The TV is still on but nobody is watching. Behind the televisions are newscasters blocked from view. Directly above the newscasters at billboard height (high up) are various paintings, a meat factory, a painting of the inside of the body (which in my mind is brown), a painting of Tarzan’s loin cloth. It’s soiled. Another bleak brown horizon. But this is also an active place. Within all this stillness there is a ghost of activity. A young woman with a turtle tattoo leans back in a chair twirling her hair while a 12-legged Monsanto chicken hovers overhead.”
Besides this repertoire of “collages”, the exhibition features a new series of videos depicting a photoshoot by Benedict and Julie Verhoeven, with video inserts by Tom Humphreys and David Leonard. One more week to see the show, which will run until February 9th 2014.
