Dance the Line at Louis Stern Fine Arts surveys the 50-year career of painter Karl Benjamin with maturity, equanimity, conviction. That considerable temporal span has allowed Benjamin’s painterly eye to achieve affective maturity, to reach a legible rhythm.  The assuredness and consistency these canvases evidence are the show’s greatest strength.  

But underlying the discipline of Benjamin’s production is an equally pronounced interest in less cerebral effects—the optic, sensuous play of tightly-packed color bands (#17 [1970]), or the cinematic unfurling of a modular geometric pattern across the canvas’ surface (#5 [1986]).  This interplay between almost mathematical process and compellingly intuitive product prompts a sustained engagement with the exhibition; resistant to trite conceptual summations, Benjamin’s canvases demand time. For to conceive of these works purely in terms of their technical prowess, or their obvious rapport with a variety of iconic  abstractions, from the murals of Sol LeWitt to the dizzying linear fields of Bridget Riley, is to miss one less tangible, but nonetheless essential point: the artist’s evidenced pleasure in his craft, his certainty in the medium of painting itself.

- Nico Machida

 


(*Images, from top to bottom:  Karl Benjamin, Dance the Line, September 29 - December 22, 2007; Louis Stern Fine Arts, #42, 1964, oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 51 in, Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles.  Karl Benjamin, Dance the Line, September 29 - December 22, 2007; Louis Stern Fine Arts, #17, 1970, oil on canvas, 56 3/4 x 56 3/4 in, Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles.  Karl Benjamin, Dance the Line, September 29 - December 22, 2007; Louis Stern Fine Arts, #5, 1986, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 in, Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles.)