Ben Mazey: Painting Now 2024
- Ben Mazey
- Eora / Sydney
Ben Mazey brings a dazzling dimensionality to our Painting Now program with an arresting new sequence of painterly ceramic wall sculptures. Dripping in molten gold and sweeps of muted ivory that play out against the raw, canvas-like negative space of unglazed raku, the artist’s ribboning pieces ripple off the wall and tesselate to form optically charged installations in three-dimensional relief.
“I wanted to present works that were all anchored in the same starting point,” says Mazey, whose practice is internationally celebrated for its interplay of precision and poeticism – a melding of mathematical rigour with a dreamy, romantic, elemental amorphousness that seems bound to the organic materiality and serendipitous effects common to both painting and clay. “I’ve always seen these as big, slow ceramic brush strokes.”
True to the ambitions of Painting Now, which celebrates an expanded conception of art’s most storied medium with artists who test the limits of the painting field, Mazey’s practice pushes beyond the canvas and off the wall with its bold entanglement of painting, sculpture and ceramics. “I see these as sculptural paintings. A sculpture of a painting of a white square, a sculpture of a painting of a gold ribbon, et cetera,” he says, noting the playful, Duchamp-like remove in this approach to representation. “This is not a white stripe. It’s a sculpture of a white stripe.”
Mazey’s work has been a striking feature of some of the most evocative and directional interiors of the last decade. “I’ve always emotionally responded to Dansaekhwa,” he says of the inspiration for his Painting Now series. “A one-colour painting that somehow manages to have such depth and power in simplicity.”
To preview and acquire work by Ben Mazey, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au
What were some of your early influences and how do these continue to inform your practice?
This is something I think about a lot. There’s almost this internal catalogue of things I’ve returned to for as long as I can remember that really strike a chord. I don’t necessarily think there’s a thematic or genre thread, but the common factor is that I just have this emotional reaction. Some go way back to childhood. In no specific order: The land art of Andy Goldsworthy – in particular, one image of layered yellow leaves across a damp branch that almost forms a square of yellow. The kinetic sculptures of Len Lye – hands down my earliest memory of being emotionally moved by art in a way I couldn’t really even figure out why. I’m calling it was 1985 and my Grandfather took me to an exhibition of Len’s in Wellington. Dansaekhwa – there’s something in the simplicity of a one-colour painting that punches me in the gut in ways I can’t articulate. A ‘successful work’ is kinda bullshit to try to quantify, but I’m incredibly proud of the simplicity in my practice. This sounds so lofty, but there’s something like ‘writing a poem with one word’ that I adore.
A few years ago, I read The Andy Warhol Diaries and I’m now pretty much a super fan. His view on the world back then seems so relevant now (especially pop culture, of which I am a big consumer). I read online a quote the other day that was along the lines of “if Andy were alive today, he would love TikTok”. Another layer of his work that keeps informing my practice is the repetition. Quite simply, I find it so calming and also really aesthetically pleasing, this idea of the same thing over and over again. All the work I have in Painting Now is anchored in this idea of repeating 50 x 20-centimetre rectangles and then manipulating and arranging them. It’s the same thing over and over again; each one completely unique but also exactly the same.
Jean DuBuffet – in particular, the monochrome works anchored in a black outline of 3D shapes. Ram Dass – I listen to an awful lot of Ram Dass in the studio. I know this is quite a reach, but I can absolutely go down an internal rabbit hole thinking about how the flags are all the same at their inception and, depending on how I manipulate them, no two are exactly the same. Kind of how we are all born basically the same, and then depending on how life manipulates us we all turn out different on a micro level, but stay the same on a macro level. No two flags are the same even though they look it; no two fingerprints are the same, even though they look it.
I am well aware that the Ram Dass ‘essence of existence’ is probably irrelevant to most people and only makes sense in my head. On the flip side, I really think that no matter what I say about the work, people look at it and they like it or they don’t. Someone is going to put it on their wall because it looks nice, and if that’s as far as they get with it, then that’s brilliant. I adore this Etel Adnan monologue for those reasons. I can give inspiration until the cows come home, but am I just post-rationalising to sound smart? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, I think my work has real beauty and it shouldn’t feel taboo to say I’m motivated by that.
What initially drew you to your medium?
I love how honest it is. In a really crude sense, clay is dirt and water, and that absolute raw simplicity as a starting point excites me so much. It’s tactile, and there’s a pace to things I adore too. You can’t rush ceramic – I can make as much work as I can make in a day, but that’s just this starting point, and there’s then this period of a couple of weeks as things dry and are fired, then fired again, et cetera, et cetera. Purely due to the laws of physics (how clay dries, et cetera), you can’t rush or force those steps.
What have been some of your favourite career experiences?
I was invited to be part of a group show at India Mahdavi’s project space in Paris earlier this year. I’m really proud of the work I showed, but also that I was returning to Paris (I lived there for seven years or so until 2019) for the first time as an artist. It really felt like a moment in the early stages of this new chapter (I began my practice in 2020, so it wasn’t at all part of my life when I was in Paris before). I had my third solo show at C. Gallery in Melbourne in July and I bloody loved it. You’ll roll your eyes at this, but I’m so pumped to be part of Painting Now and am going to list that, too!
Could you tell us about the artworks featured in Painting Now?
From the get-go, I wanted to present a body of work that all anchored in the exact same thing – the 20 x 50-centimetre rectangle that is then manipulated and arranged in different clusters. I see these individually as sculptures of brush strokes, and then they are arranged into paintings or sculptures of paintings. I was super clear in my head that I wanted to use the areas of unglazed raku as a negative space play and that the materiality laid on top would be purely white or purely gold. I find there’s a real Jekyll and Hyde/Yin-Yang to this – the white is so clean and calm, and the gold is camp and brash and loud. I think so many of the ideas and initial inspiration come from that sort of internal catalogue of artistic influences I listed earlier.
Is there a throughline in your Painting Now series and how does this reflect the direction of your practice?
The throughline is absolutely the restraint and limited elements (a flag, white or gold) that make up each of the finished works. For me, this isn’t reductive or even minimalist, it’s more that I can distil so many references and ideas and things I want to explore and come out with something really simple that doesn’t feel like it lacks depth. This represents a body of work I really want to show at this moment. I could honestly see myself sitting here in 20 years and still just banging on about how I like to make ceramic flags all uniform in scale and come up with different ways to lay them out over and over and over again. I was saying to a friend the other day that I don’t have an end goal specifically, I just want to keep going, and that feels amazing. He turned around and said, “That’s why it’s called a practice. You’re not looking to clock the game, you’re just happy endlessly practising.”
