7 February - 1 March

Ben SANDO

FANCY

Ben Sando’s work is an intriguing exploration of how we engage with and interpret images. The experiment of applying simple instructions to create a set of paintings—especially with the element of placing “fake” images in unusual interiors and introducing erratic, almost absurd splotches—seems to be a clever way of disrupting our usual relationship with art and its context.

There’s a playful quality to the idea of creating something that is both familiar and unsettling. By combining the “fake” with the preposterous, Sando seems to be challenging the viewer to reconsider what makes an image or object “authentic” or “real.” The splodge, in particular, seems like a powerful tool in this questioning. It acts almost like a wildcard—disrupting the expected harmony of the image and creating a tension between what’s planned and what’s arbitrary.

The idea that the background patterns are drawn from everyday decor items (like tiles or fabrics) and that they’re sometimes “bungled” or playful adds to the sense of the absurd. They’re not perfect or elegant; they have a kind of awkwardness to them that might make us think about our own interactions with decoration or art as something both deliberate and chaotic.

Ken Bolton writes,

There has been something of this in all the Ben Sando work that I have seen.  They are exciting and one remembers them as an encounter.  They have a swift presence, arriving with a bang, and they’re ‘not’, in that sense, ‘going anywhere’. 

How do you see Sando’s use of “pretence” and “artifice” in these works? Do you think he’s playing with the idea that art, by nature, is always a form of pretending or staging?

Read ‘Is there Room in the Room You Room in? by Ken Bolton here.