SALTS: Charles Benjamin

P for Everything is an exhibition by Swedish artist Charles Benjamin devised for Kunsthalle Lissabon. The result of an ongoing exchange between KL directors João Mourão and Luís Silva and SALTS director Samuel Leuenberger, the exhibition marks an evolution of ideas that began with Not Old Not New, Benjamin’s solo exhibition at SALTS in Birsfelden, Switzerland in November 2018.

Mourão and Silva approach Kunsthalle Lissabon as a social catalyst for emergent and evolving conversations. For the gallery’s ten-year anniversary, the directors have invited four co-hosts to the space: SALTS, PIVÔ, CURA. and ICA Philadelphia. Shaped by the directors’ interest in the structural re-orientation of collaboration, each organization was invited to execute a project, as well as temporarily take over operations at the gallery. More than the common practice of guest curating, the gallery takeover has meant that KL, its staff and operations, will forfeit ‘business as usual’ and instead report to the host’s own staff, adopting their operational logics for the length of each collaboration.

For our invitation, it was clear that SALTS’s social structure would be central to the exhibition. Approaching Mourão and Silva’s brief – that of a carte blanche opportunity – required trust and understanding. Where inviting an artist of no prior relation could create something singular, it didn't suit this invitation. It made more sense to think about how SALTS conducts itself, how it extends into the world and is, energetically speaking, received by its collaborators, friends and audiences. The collaboration with KL thus prompted a self-reflexive turn: a careful look at how our networks are cultivated and sustained.

Speaking to Charles Benjamin about the value of things launches a catalogue of images and sensations. He has many ideas about the concept of worth and its attendant materialistic challenges, of the stakes of exposure and of selling out. Post-conceptual in his principles, Benjamin speaks about art as a process of internalization: where a sunset isn’t only a sunset, but a coveted minibreak: a vinyl image pasted onto the wall of a basement hotel room covering for the fact that there’s no window. It is one of a system of visual appropriation not unlike advertising, where the integrity of an image must serve a fast fantasy or a lifestyle. Last year, the artist wrote a poetry book entitled The New Testament Two, offering, as the title infers, mock prophetic aphorisms such as: 'if there was a poem for everything, there wouldn't be anything out there anymore'. Some things are better left to the imagination.

Kunsthalle Lissabon presents P for Everything, an exhibition by Swedish artist Charles Benjamin featuring new paintings specifically devised for the gallery space. P for Everything stages a set of oversized canvases that depict life on an epic scale. From snapshots of a quiet interior life to aspirational hallmarks, the paintings expand motifs to the level of larger-than-life protagonists: a still life, an ethereal mobile, a calculator, a t-shirt and pants, a house-within-a-house, parquet flooring, a lawn. Hyper-minimalist and proto-naïve, the ochre line of the oil-stick presents viewers with a lodestar to guide them through the space. In its oily tint, the paint is further redolent of the smeary logbook a mechanic may use to keep track of ongoing work on their engine. The canvases may then be viewed as a ledger, charting the shape and technicality of things in case one should forget. Like the logbook, the canvases act as both index and record for an ongoing process of material adjustment.

For Not Old Not New at SALTS in 2018, Benjamin had similarly installed a set of awkwardly shaped canvases fitted to the dimensions of the space. Squeezed into the subterranean space of Kunsthalle Lissabon, the canvases of P for Everything take this conceit further: Benjamin has stretched the cloth of each canvas downward over rickety feet. The effect brings to mind houses comically perched on stilts, or hulking bodies vying for room. In doing so, the artist deliberately avoids the preciousness bestowed on the genre of painting. Following rough-and-ready methods and designed for quick disassembly, the canvas stretcher was assembled in the exhibition space and the frames produced from wood blanks sourced at a nearby wood trader.
With its focus on process rather than exalted objects, P for Everything sets the temporal economy of painting front and centre, with the artist trading his works for the equivalent of a month's rent, services, or otherwise leaving them at an Autobahn rest stop for an impromptu pop-up show hosted by friends. The sparse canvases may thus be read as an extension of the artist’s daily activities, rather than as, per a western canon of painting, a means of gilded storytelling. This spiritual quest to free objects from longstanding traditions amounts to something like savouring a minor poetics of the everyday.
P for Everything stands for everything an image can and wrestles to be.

Charles Benjamin (*1989, Stockholm, Sweden) is a painter based in Berlin. He often uses his practice to explore personal problems, at once formally documenting and making fun of economical hardship, spiritual depletion, and disbelief in his own ability and the medium itself. His practice apart from painting sometimes branches out in periodical projects such as living without any basic comforts on a gallery floor for two weeks (Being a better person (And Possibly Helping Others), 2016) or sitting under a tree for the time of an average work- ing week (Work/Work Balance, 2017). His work has been shown at New Day Gallery and Mario Kreuzberg (both in Berlin), Espacio Falso (Sangtiago, Chile), St. Etienne Design Bienale and SALTS (Switzerland).

With the kind support of: República Portuguesa / DGArtes, FfAI, Coleção Maria e Armando Cabral.

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