Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/70299/whos-afraid-of-hot-pink-canary-yellow-and-midnight-blue/
John Yau reviews two exhibitions that foreground color: Paul Behnke: An Awful Rainbow at Kathryn Markel Gallery (through May 18) and Stanley Whitney: Other Colors I Forget at Team Gallery, New York (through May 12).
Yau notes that "In Behnke’s best paintings, our focus shifts between dissonance and order, large and small, solid planes and scraped 'unfinished' areas. Where an earlier layer has not been painted over, its color punches through the hole and grab us. Hot and cool colors abut, as well as complementary ones. You have the feeling that Behnke is trying to pull out all the stops, that he wants structure and chaos to coincide." Whitney, Yau writes, "extends his gamut, going from thin, crackled surfaces, to washy, translucent layers exposing painted over shapes, to solid planes of color. And he might suddenly paint wet into wet, suspending brushstrokes of maroon in a green rectangle. Clearly, there is little or no plan when he begins with one color and moves to the next. It is comparable to writing a poem word by word, rather than line by line."
Link to Post:
http://www.supremefiction.com/theidea/2013/04/an-awful-rainbow.html
James Panero writes about the work of painter Paul Behnke for the exhibition Paul Behnke: An Awful Rainbow at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, on view from April 18 - May 18, 2013.
Panero begins: "Paul Behnke is a painter of layers. He paints less in strokes than in slicks. In the studio he uses spatulas, sticks, brushes, and rags to build up, scrape back, rebuild, dig out, and pull up his acrylics to the point where there is no front or back, top or bottom, figure or ground. His contentious colors conceal as they reveal, add as they subtract, draw as they erase... His paintings, all square, act more like descriptions than depictions. They are not horizontal like landscapes or vertical like portraits. They are real things as much as the images of things... What results are layered objects of sedimentary colors. They mean what they are. They become what we make them. Their final layer is the meaning we apply."
Link to Post:
http://www.thoughtsthatcureradically.com/2013/02/temporal-shifts-catalog-essay.html
Caleb De Jong posts his catalog essay for the exhibition Temporal Shifts: Paintings by works by Craig Olson, Paul Behnke, and Anne Russinof, curated by Matthew Neil Gehring, on view at Flecker Gallery, Suffolk County Community College through February 28, 2012.
De Jong writes: "Craig Olson, Paul Behnke and Anne Russinof harness painting’s ability to arrest time, in their discrete yet complementary studio practices. The exhibition, Temporal Shifts, coalesces around a similarly resonant painterly language, one that revolves in part, but is not limited to the grid, to fields of color, or to an approach to mark making that is expansive and idiosyncratic. Rather, their language remains in service to a flatly rendered pictorial object."
Link to Post:
http://www.ahtcast.com/2013/01/artist-interview-paul-behnke.html
Phillip J. Mellen conducts an in-depth interview with painter Paul Behnke about his work.
Behnke talks several times in the interview about his spontaneous, materials-based approach. "To me," he comments, "especially at the beginning, the work is all about the materials, I just start. I don't have any preconceived colors I'm going to use... that all evolves as the work progresses. I do a lot of alternating... there's a lot of going back and forth in my mind between what to leave in and what to leave out, that's a tension that I want to be apparent in my work, that tension of what you keep and what you do away with - how those things are constantly jostling and competing with each other."
Link to Post:
http://www.furiousdreams.com/blog/?p=12937
Victoria Webb photoblogs visits to several painting exhibitions currently on view in Atlanta, including A Web of Artists: Friends of a Social Network on view at Thomas Deans Fine Art with paintings by Ken Kewley, Philip Koch, Paul Behnke, Harry Shooshinoff, Bill Gingles, Donald Beal, Mitchell Johnson, Alicia Rothman, Greg Minah, and Rick Stevens (through October 13).
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/note/paul-behnke-a-theatre-of-colour/
An essay by John Yau on the paintings of Paul Behnke, written for the exhibition Paul Behnke: Like Giants, on view at The Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia through September 30, 2012.
Yau writes: "Without any hint of irony, Behnke embraces the legacy of improvisation central to a number of the Abstract Expressionists. In his high-key, color-saturated paintings of planar forms and flame-like wisps, he wants to celebrate an imaginative space in which light and solid, translucence and opacity engage in a lively, open-ended dialogue. While Behnke’s paintings may evoke rooms and still-lives, they never become representational. He doesn’t abstract from life, but begins with paint and color. This is the key to his work. The final composition emerges from the act of putting paint on and scraping it away, of finding the painting."
Link to Post:
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2011/03/paul-behnke.html
Interview with Brooklyn based painter Paul Behnke. "I’m currently taking a break from larger canvases to focus on small paintings on paper. On the more disposable surface I’m able to trick myself and be more relaxed. Color and transparency are becoming more important and the edges of the work are starting to play a more definite role."
