Pablo Ben

Lives and works in San Diego, CA

Artist statement

I was trained in anthropology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and in Latin American history at the University of Chicago, but I came to painting through recovery from an eating disorder. I began making art during online recovery meetings, and painting became another way of speaking at a moment when compulsive eating had often functioned as a way of not saying. My fascination with color developed alongside that recovery, as a source of attention, pleasure, curiosity, and possibility. Through experimenting with stencils, I became fascinated by these commercially produced images and developed a method closely related to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea of bricolage: working with a limited repertoire of preexisting fragments and discovering what can be made from what is already available. I choose and combine images partly through free association and partly deliberately, allowing meanings to emerge through repetition, juxtaposition, accident, and later reflection. My training as an anthropologist and historian shapes how I understand both images and materials. I am interested in the histories of paints, pigments, inks, markers, manufacturing, trade, value, and obsolescence, as well as in the social and historical lives of the images I use. Aesthetically, I am drawn to Bauhaus, Constructivism, Minimalism, and their economy of form, yet my work repeatedly moves toward accumulation, saturated color, repetition, and excess. I begin near “less is more” and often end closer to Iris...

Artwork