The fabulous made-up title of this show says it all, as in "I am Chaoticus." For the last two decades Steve DiBenedetto has been pushing the optical properties of brushed paint not to their physical breaking point but to the point of cognitive warpage, the place where you don't know what you're looking at but love looking anyway. His paint handling has only grown bolder and more original. Meanwhile the imagery has been simplified and made more geometric: Giant organic skyscrapers look part Ork, part cyborg, and part mutant. That's just DiBenedetto taking Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas for a spin around the solar system. His colors, finally, have grown more electric and jarring, while his surfaces seem to fight back against the paint. Whatever is happening here, it really is a new sort of chaos.
June 14, 2008
