Portland art exhibit contrasts 2 artists with a shared language in color | Column
Two painters separated by geography but united by an obsession with color have opened a joint exhibition at a Portland gallery this fall.
Stephen Benenson, who maintains a studio above Space on Congress Street, and Michael Berryhill, working from Ellenville, New York, are the featured artists in "A Backwards Bloom," on view through November 14. The show's title gestures toward the mystical framework of Les Nabis, the French Symbolist brotherhood founded by Paul Sérusier in the wake of Impressionism. The Nabis held that sensory and linguistic experiences carry meaning beyond mere representation, and the exhibition asks viewers to consider whether that same principle operates in the paintings on the walls.
Benenson's canvases draw on Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, rendered in thick, glossy paint that feels lush and tactile. Berryhill's work drifts between figuration and abstraction, built with a dry brush that leaves chalky, thin textures. Yet both artists arrive at a similar effect: a searing luminosity that seems to radiate from the paint itself rather than from any single image.
Their shared emphasis on color becomes apparent when viewers notice the vivid pink that both men favor, a hue associated with Philip Guston. In Berryhill's large-scale "Palais Romantique," it reads as abundant warmth; in Benenson's "The Hatter's Table #1," it suggests fleshy vulnerability; in Berryhill's "Gloria" and Benenson's "Transformation," it carries a disquieting softness. For both painters, color functions as the primary carrier of meaning, independent of recognizable subject matter.
Both artists work slowly and repetitively. Berryhill has been known to revise a single painting fifty or sixty times before considering it finished. A time-lapse video installed in the gallery's backroom, accessible by following a sign marked "Rabbit Hole," documents four months of Benenson's layering process on "Hatter's Table #2," showing him repeatedly scraping away and rebuilding hues. The visible history of these revisions becomes part of the work's meaning.
The exhibition arose organically: Benenson, preparing for a show at Space, submitted a list of painters he admired, and Berryhill emerged as a choice both artists considered one of the most important colorists of the era. The connection deepened by a mutual fascination with Piero della Francesca's "The Nativity," an obscure religious painting that both men had studied obsessively.
The show invites a simple experiment: circle the gallery slowly and notice what the colors do to your body and emotions. A painting titled "Golden Afternoon" sounds cheerful but feels unsettling, its tornadic greens and black flora creating unease. Meanwhile, Berryhill's monumental "Unbound," measuring ninety by seventy-four inches, initially reads as a giant floral still life until a human figure appears, prompting questions about scale and space that the painting's swirling blues, oranges, and pinks resolve into wistful pleasure.
Space, 534 Congress Street, is open through November 14. More information is available at space538.org or by calling 207-828-5600.
