Art Paris 2024 - Ben Walker

1 of April - 7th of April - Art Paris 2024

Ben Walker’s work refers to and reinterprets a distinct era of British culture and TV programmes and films, particularly 1970s and 1980s educational programmes for schools, children films and public information films. In his work, Walker is particularly interested in the strange, uncanny quality that becomes clear when watching these sources retrospectively. Walker attempts to communicate their eerie and disquieting air as well as a nostalgic sense of the familiar, reassuring or comfortable. The paintings are impressions of a half remembered, imagined past, existing on the edges of memory and nostalgia where ideas of folklore, the unknown, the wyrd, science fiction and the supernatural are meshed together. Embedded in these paintings is the loss of childhood innocence and with it, the death of a bygone utopia.

The works on display are painted on a coarse textured linen. Oranges and reds are overlaid with greyish greens and lapis lazuli. Importance is attached to contours, shapes and how colours are placed next to one another. The oil paint, thinned with turpentine, is scrubbed into the weave of the linen, and then may be removed and repainted over and over. Consequently, traces of earlier figures often remain visible in the finished pictures, articulating the haunting theme of the past repeating into the present.