XSTATIC, Trudy Benson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, presents the artist’s latest body of paintings. The exhibition’s title reflects the energetic nature of the paintings, along with the visual aspect of the letter X, seen in the intersecting lines that cover the canvases. A continuation of her practice, XSTATIC further explores the influence of pioneering computer art on contemporary abstraction. 

In a departure from her first exhibition with the gallery in October 2021, Benson’s compositions have turned to emphasize fine line work made with an airbrush. From afar, warped planes buzz with motion; when the viewer steps closer, densely-scribbled marks are revealed as the source rather than solid blocks of color. The paintings are rendered in color combinations from monochromatic palettes to power clashing hues, creating harmony in the unexpected. 

“Here is a downright paradox, a whimsical aporia: albeit abstract and self-reflexive, the luxuriously colored and highly intricate paintings of Trudy Benson are imbued with rich art-historical and present-day references,” writes Raphy Sarkissian in the exhibition’s catalogue, “Within Benson’s methodically constructed pictorial fields, where geometric structures and painterly gestures cohabit, autonomy and allusion register as being cut from the same cloth, as inextricable sides of the same coin. To confront the compositionally innovative and chromatically lavish paintings of the recently realized series titled XSTATIC is to come face to face with a self-contained formalist language that is nonetheless inseparable from the boundless archive of modernist abstraction and the visual grammars of its canonical masters.”