Paint Isn’t Just Paint at the New York Studio School

The exhibition at the New York Studio School featured the works of painters Brenda Goodman, Steve DiBenedetto, and Bendix Harms. The exhibition included 17 works: three by Harms and 14 equally divided between Goodman and DiBenedetto. The grouping prompted reflection on the dialogue between abstraction and figuration, opacity and transparency within contemporary art. The arrangement presented a challenge to the viewer, requiring an examination of each artist individually rather than focusing on comparisons between them. Further investigation revealed that Bendix Harms is a 59-year-old German artist living in northern Denmark who paints directly on canvas using a palette knife, inspired by his immediate circumstances. Goodman’s work addresses pain and sadness through personal experience, while DiBenedetto's paintings incorporate humor, despair, and tenderness, exploring figural presences that feel both primordial and post-apocalyptic. The materials themselves are discussed, with the paint being viewed as a form of ectoplasm, connecting DiBenedetto to thinkers like Artaud and Jensen, while Goodman’s work navigates between the explicit and enigmatic.

The presentation of the exhibition utilized an imbalance in representation to force a specific mode of engagement, suggesting that imposed relationships between the artists are often less instructive than individual investigation. The pivot from comparing the established figures of Goodman and DiBenedetto to incorporating Harms highlights a tension within art discourse regarding the definition of artistic lineage and the necessity of acknowledging external influences. This dynamic reflects a larger struggle in contemporary art about navigating complex, morally ambiguous states—the "Scylla and Charybdis" dilemma—rather than finding settled stylistic answers. The material shift from focusing on visual representation to viewing paint as an energetic substance—ectoplasm—suggests a move beyond purely aesthetic concerns into the realm of phenomenological experience, echoing philosophical explorations concerning consciousness and altered states. The juxtaposition of Harms’s seemingly cheerful, grotesque imagery against Goodman’s introspection and DiBenedetto’s visceral forms invites an examination of how humor and confrontation can modulate profound existential realities. This structure implies that true understanding emerges not from defining a fixed relationship between artists, but from tracing the complex, often contradictory negotiations between personal experience, cultural context, and the material substance of art itself. What frameworks are needed to account for these shifting, liminal modes of artistic existence?