STEVE DIBENEDETTO: Uncertainty Takes a Holiday

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present Steve DiBenedetto: Uncertainty Takes a Holiday, the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery, on view from October 26 through December 9, 2023. The exhibition will include both paintings and works on paper, all created within the last two years.

Possessed by a desire to “maximize” a painting, DiBenedetto continues to find new ways to exploit the possibilities of oil paint through crusty, built-up surfaces and bright, jewel-toned shapes that gleam in the midst of gritty, impastoed muck. Though he can apply paint so thickly it might qualify as bas-relief, the forms themselves are flattened into the background in a way that often feels like massive amounts of time and space have been compressed into a single plane. As always, DiBenedetto is working out his ideas on the canvas, adding and subtracting elements in an iterative process such that even when a work is finished, the agitation of its creation remains visible on the surface.

Throughout his career, DiBenedetto’s work has reflected his intellectual interests, from his early investigations into the transmission and erosion of information and the vibrations of technology, to his well-known explorations of states of altered consciousness through the iconography of the octopus, the helicopter and the ferris wheel. Most recently, DiBenedetto’s attention has been fixated on theoretical physics: quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, string theory and its idea that our universe exists in eleven dimensions. Suddenly, the 11-tentacled structures in his paintings make sense, the circular whorls at their termini now understood as portals into other realms.

In the painting titled Uncertainty Takes a Holiday (2022-23), a dark form stretches its tentacles, some of which appear to contain eyes at their tips, others that end in circles containing their own little miniature abstractions. DiBenedetto shapes the arms into rounded, embodied forms that reach out from some nebulous, murky space, seeming to glow with the yellow and white light emanating from somewhere behind it — a holy radiance for the scientific age. By contrast, Higgs Hippy HellHole (2022) feels relatively flattened: portals fashioned from one or two saturated hue, tentacles crossing each other in the same plane within a golden field that doesn’t glow so much as it stuns with its assertiveness.