The Roads Ahead, Scary & Serene

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The New York Sun

Benjamin Edwards’s new paintings feature fragmented architectural forms, numbers, logos, letters, geometric shapes, and pixilated human figures. These elements float between the edges of the canvas as if they were on an oversized computer monitor. Unfortunately, the paintings do not elaborate on the discoveries Mr. Edwards made in the best paintings in his solo exhibitions at Greenberg Van Doren in 2001 and 2004.

Mr. Edwards combines the empirical and virtual by manipulating digital photographs and creating architectural fantasies using 3-D modeling software. His repetitive use of what he calls the “Cartesian grid” — a seemingly infinite ground plane that ends at a distant horizon line somewhere just below the midpoint of the canvas — continues in all but two of the paintings in this exhibition. By bringing together the formal devices of landscape, faux-pixilated shapes, and the Photoshop-inspired layering of colors, lines, and shapes, Mr. Edwards attempts to bring into question the difference between the constructed environment and the organic world — or at least our ability to perceive them.

In “World of Tomorrow” (2006) and “The Storm” (2006), chalky white skylines feel futuristic and visionary, but Mr. Edwards’s technique means they could include fragments of real structures. We have seen these pictorial ideas before in earlier works (“Automatic City” [2004] specifically), but in these canvases the ghostly architectural forms become the centerpiece of the composition. Compared to the older paintings, these two come off as uninspired reiterations.

Mr. Edwards’s panoramic views of shifting façades are inspired by his belief that “the built environment” has become “less than real and more like stage sets put up by someone or something.” It is hard not to think of the final fight scene from the film “The Matrix” while looking at these paintings, but they are missing the film’s cheesy pathos. The problem with Mr. Edwards’s fixation on the strip mall and the branding of the landscape is that, although he takes a clear stand in his writings against these things, he appears to celebrate them in these confusing, somewhat sterile, but attractive paintings.

This exhibition is named after the 1920–21 satirical dystopian novel “We,” by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. The characters have numbers for names and live in thrall to “OneState.” In this world, the imagination can be removed surgically; Frederick Taylor, the author of “The Principles of Scientific Management,” is considered a god, and citizens use a Sexual Table to determine when they will have sex. Thoughts about irrational numbers could lead to dissolution of their identities.

On his Web site, Mr. Edwards writes that America seems to be “on the down slope of the Enlightenment” and we do not want to “look under the hood of our society.” The oddly juxtaposed geometric and architectural forms that fill his canvases are meant to symbolize the demise of the American Frontier, or even the very idea of the outdoors. There are small symbols of hope, however. A fragment of a female figure is prominently placed in the painting “We” (2006). Could she represent the novel’s character I-330, who liberates the protagonist from his blind devotion to the state?

The use of the human figure in “We” and “The Wanderer” (2006) suggests a new direction for Mr. Edwards. In the latter, a video game–inspired cowboy with rifle in hand stares across the shifting planes of a digital wasteland. His gaze is fixed on a big-box retail store bearing a smiley-face logo. There is a clear tension set up between forms in this painting, a relief from the nonsensical mosaics filling most of the gallery, and a sense of dread is present.

***

Photographer David Maisel also deals with the ways in which humans have transformed the natural world. His current exhibition at the Von Lintel Gallery includes images from the “Terminal Mirage” and “Oblivion” series, including disorienting aerial views of the Great Salt Lake and Los Angeles.

By printing the images in negative in the “Oblivion” series, the viewer almost becomes an alien gazing down on the city of Los Angeles. These photographs suggest that we are only capable of seeing fragments of the world, no matter how high above the earth we go. It is hard to imagine the individual lives of the people living in these abstracted environments. By showing us the literal shape of society, Mr. Maisel holds a mirror up to the collective rather than the individual. His photographs capture a moment in historical time, the byproducts of many generations. Gauguin asked these same questions in the title of his spectacular 1897–98 Tahitian painting: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

Edwards until January 13 (730 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street, 212-445-0444);

Maisel until December 23 (555 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-0599).


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