Fine Art Woman in Red Dress Walking With Tiger

Ben Sledsens (b.1991) paints colourful ideal worlds, building an ever-expanding dream universe that combines personal mythology with a close reading of art history. People are queuing up to be a part of it.

It is piece of cake to come across why demand is so loftier for the work of this young Antwerp-based artist. He produces rich, colourful scenes that begin stories the viewer is invited to complete. They are open to interpretation in a manner that draws you in, rather than sending you away scratching your caput. And his visual language is attainable, reaching dorsum into art history for images that are at once familiar and intriguing. He is a painter who deals in mysteries rather than mystification.

Ben Sledsens © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

The media likes his work likewise, but it likewise likes the tale of a immature artist who has become an overnight awareness. Printing coverage of his 3rd solo exhibition at Antwerp's Tim Van Laere Gallery last September noted the crowds waiting to arrive -- due to covid restrictions, simply still a handy image -- and the fact that all 22 canvases inside had already sold to institutions and private collectors around the globe. There is a waiting listing for the work nevertheless to come.

Merely like many overnight sensations, Sledsens' rise is less dramatic than it seems. Information technology looks fast because he was picked upwardly early, simply subsequently his graduation from the Purple Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2015. A first solo testify at the Tim Van Laere Gallery followed in 2016, a second in 2018, and the tertiary in 2020.

Ben Sledsens, Girl in Peach Dress, 2019-2020, oil and acrylic on sheet, 190 x 150 x v,6 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

The 2 years between each show stand for slow, difficult graft. Sledsens is not a fast painter, taking as much as a month to produce each of the large canvases. Scarcity is built into his method, which naturally makes the demand all the more apparent. But the time he spends on each canvas is clear to run into in the rich textures and carefully equanimous colours, produced by combining acrylics, oils and occasionally spray pigment.

At the Academy, Sledsens was a talented painter of conventional still lives and landscapes, until the transforming experience of visiting a Georg Baselitz exhibition in Munich. Seeing these enormous canvases brought home the importance of scale, while the freedom Baselitz felt from convention, with his perversely upside-downward portraits, taught Sledsens that he could too go his ain way.

In item, seeing Baselitz gave Sledsens permission to get back to the strip cartoons he loved as a child and bring some of their themes and techniques into his work. This meant that narrative was allowed. Strong characters were immune. And in that location was no trouble with pictorial simplicity, which can expect naive in academic fine art, but is accepted as a artistic choice in cartoons.

Ben Sledsens, Rowing on the River, 2020, oil and acrylic on sheet, 190 ten 290 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

Sledsens too found a touchstone in the French post-impressionist painter Henri Rousseau, whose jungle scenes embrace flatness all the same still conjure up rich textures of vegetation. Some of his paintings are straight homages, such equally Tiger in the Jungle (Hommage Henri Rousseau) (2016) and Jaguar in the Jungle (2018). But Rousseau'south way with foliage also creeps into Sledsens' early interiors, filling out flower shops or domestic scenes. At that place is a potent flavour of Matisse hither equally well.

In interviews, Sledsens oftentimes talks about his fascination with art history and its continuing inspiration. In improver to Rousseau and Matisse, he frequently cites Pieter Bruegel the Elder, for his treatment of landscape. But his choice when invited to option favourites from the drove of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp is likewise instructive.

Ben Sledsens, Girl Lying in the Grass, 2019-2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 230 x 210 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

Beginning of all, he singled out Jean Brusselmans, an creative person loosely connected with Flemish expressionism, who created flat, stylised landscapes that were nonetheless perfectly recognisable as Flanders. There is something of Brusselmans' angular clouds in some of Sledsens' paintings, and a nagging sense of familiarity in the lay of the land. Then he chose James Ensor, not for one of his celebrated carnival masks or skeletons, but for The Cuirassiers at Waterloo (1891), in which a vortex of mounted French soldiers presses down on a square of British infantry.

Ensor is cited for his free affect and his use of color, but at that place is also a connection here in the activeness. Sledsens is fascinated past medieval themes, and from his second solo exhibition onwards knights start to appear in his paintings. Treatments range from close combat in The Boxing (2018), apparently inspired past the Bayeux Tapestry but with echoes from across the history of chivalric painting, to the figures lost in a mural in Two Knights and a Lady (2018).

Ben Sledsens, Ii Knights and a Lady, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 230 x 210 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

These paintings are also part of a trend in Sledsens' work, abroad from scenes taken from gimmicky life, towards a more than allegorical or folkloric approach. The stylised vegetation no longer slips into the background of a restaurant or kitchen, merely makes up the whole world, while the distant figures of knights, hunters, or straying dogs draw u.s. in. Following the story will have us in that location, into the forest or into the nighttime.

Ben Sledsens, The Huntswoman and the Wanderer, 2020, oil and acrylic on sail, 190 x 290 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

Two recurring archetypes in Sledsens' paintings have a personal significance: The Wanderer, a bundle on a stick slung over his shoulder, represents the artist himself, while The Huntswoman represents his girlfriend, the fashion designer Charlotte De Geyter. She is also the model in Girl in the Yellowish Bloom Dress (2018), and her creations announced throughout Sledsens' full-length portraits of women, although apart from her, each model is manifestly imaginary.

Ben Sledsens, Girl in the Xanthous Flower Dress, 2018, oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvass, 200 x 150 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

There are nonetheless hints of Matisse and Rousseau in the plants that announced in these portraits, of Bruegel and other Flemish Primitives in the landscapes seen backside them. But the strongest echo is of David Hockney, in the posture, and the way each sitter dominates the frame, looking directly out of the canvas.

Other archetypes in Sledsens' work include woodcutters, bird-catchers and rat-catchers, all in modern dress just with floral borders or backgrounds that strongly recall medieval religious paintings. It seems entirely logical that Sledsens has been commissioned to produce a floral stained-glass window for the restored Saint Gertrude's Chapel in the grounds of Gaasbeek Castle, in Flemish Brabant.

Ben Sledsens, Shooting Apples, 2019-2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 200 x 300 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

Very occasionally the characters in Sledsens' paintings are recognisable, such equally the version of William Tell in Shooting Apples (2019-twenty), or Devil in a Arrange (2020), in which the Adversary stands in a flat Flemish field, engaged in a sword fight with someone just out of the frame. In both cases the viewer is challenged to consummate the narrative, to puzzle out what is happening and why. And while Devil in a Suit is immediately funny, it too creates a frisson, perhaps stirring a folk retentiveness of warnings that we all might meet the Devil while walking in the fields.

Ben Sledsens, The Devil in a Suit, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 200 x 180 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

Folk tales are also nowadays in a recent series of animal paintings. The traditional characters of these hares and tortoises, foxes and magpies are implied rather than their stories retold, and Sledsens says he is not interested in delivering the moral lessons that become with the fables. Instead, each image is an try to solve recurrent problems in landscape painting. How to depict nature without getting trapped in endless greens? And how to deal with empty space?

Ben Sledsens, The Red Trick, 2019-2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 200 x 180 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

Each of these animal paintings shares a grade: trees to either side, the fabulous brute at the bottom of the frame, and in the middle a void, a long view to a lake. Each sheet takes on an intense color, continued with a season, the weather condition, or a time of day. In The Red Pull a fast one on (2019-20) it is a nocturnal blue, in Magpie with Pearl Earing (2019-20) it is a sunset yellowish. The result is a narrative tension between the literal story of the creature in the foreground and the atmosphere created past the color and texture of the void. Do we follow the beast in its journey across the frame, or autumn into the heart?

Ben Sledsens, Morning Encounter, 2019-2020, iii panels, oil, acrylic and spray paint on sail, 250 x 555 cm © Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

These paintings demonstrate a more recent influence, Claude Monet, which is as well apparent in Morning time Run across (2019-twenty). This is another painting with a void, spread across 3 panels, more than 5 metres wide. A walker in jeans, t-shirt and sneakers -- mayhap The Wanderer once again -- looks across a lake to where a naked woman is bathing.

The distinction is that Monet was painting from life, whereas Sledsens is painting from Monet, and his own imagination. Only the result is sincere, a dream image rather than a post-modern mash-upwards, or art history as a playground. This is perhaps the surreptitious of Sledsens' appeal: he taps into his own longing, creating a utopian globe in which he would like to live. Then he offers to share that globe with us.

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Source: https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/ben-sledsens-shapes-art-history-into-personal-utopias

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