BISA BENNETT
T oronto-based artist Bisa Bennett explains that her approach to art is structured by light, how its presence or absence helps us give meaning to our activities and surroundings. Her oil and acrylic works all confirm this fundamental concern with light, though within at least two distinct styles. Certain paintings appear washed out by a white light that reluctantly defines forms and spaces. Other works bask in deep red, registering the play of light in complementary tones of brown, yellow and orange. These two styles are not mutually exclusive – though some of Bennett’s paintings belong solely to one or the other category – but more often the pale whites and warm reds interact within a single canvas, conveying different qualities of light, space, texture and meaning.
In canvases dominated by white light, the spaces and objects Bennett suggests are harder to perceive, their contours almost drowned out by reverberating luminosity. Pale lines barely differentiated from their washed-out surroundings involve the viewer in a kind of guesswork, sometimes yielding representational images, other times leading to abstraction. Elsewhere this strong white light lets Bennett emphasize shadows, which often become the clearest indicator of the shape on the canvas. In every case, her planes in white create a certain coldness and distance, making their objects seem removed, unattainable and flattened.
This impression of detachment is reversed in the red regions of Bennett’s work. These tend to feature detailed depictions of objects from an extremely close perspective. Her objects are endowed with extreme three-dimensionality achieved through detailed shading and the very controlled registration of luminosity. Rather than overwhelming brightness, these works admit a limited source of light. This adds tactility to the objects, which Bennett emphasizes further by layering and gouging her paint. The intensity of these shapes and objects is bolstered by their strong reds, which evoke at once passion and strength, but also temptation and mortality.
Bennett’s most intriguing works, then, combine and manipulate these two registers, exploring the dynamic exchange of flatness and depth, coldness and warmth, ambiguity and clarity. As her artistic vocabulary continues to develop, this stylistic interplay will only increase in complexity and yield increasingly fascinating results.
Website: www.bisabennett.com