Contributed by R. Blake Miller / Benjamin Klein’s solo exhibition “Sentinels and Satellites” at Tappeto Volante Gallery is at once enchanting and unnerving, like the fresh memory of a dream seen vividly even as it slips away. With an unapologetically saturated palette, the Brooklyn-based artist lays down paint in both translucent coats of tinted light and thick pools, blending natural textures with sublime color-mixing techniques. A surreal story involving animals and their plant counterparts unfolds. What initially feels inviting and innocent becomes tinted by dread. Mythic symbols hover beyond easy reading, coaxing viewers to explore their relationships with art more deeply.
Figures emerge as half-familiar sentinels guiding us through a maze. Klein layers gestures and images over time, letting forms appear and disappear into the landscape, like fleeting thoughts. The process, in which emotion and intuition guide the brush as much as conscious design, is both meticulous and untamed. It is striking how sincere the artist’s world feels. Clearly, vulnerability produces inspiration.
This unusual sensibility may stem in part from his unusual career path. Klein trained and competed as an amateur mixed-martial artist, a pursuit that demands extraordinary discipline, humility, and situational awareness. His work subtly incorporates these qualities, reflecting patience with hard tasks, respect for ritual, and resilience. His martial rigor translates into a painting practice that seems both grounded in raw physicality and transcendent by virtue of meditative focus.
Klein builds on traditions of surreal whimsy and visionary art, but he doesn’t indulge in nostalgia or pastiche. Instead, he uses familiar hints as hooks for pulling us deeper into terrain of his own making. The longer we explore his painted forests and neon skies, the more we accept his elastic logic. We aren’t asked to solve paintings like puzzles, simply to experience them and to get constructively lost. There is a gentle critique embedded in this approach. While Klein operates within the art world, he doesn’t play by its more alienating rules. His practice stands in quiet defiance of an art industry that often rewards spectacle or irony while devaluing introspection.
“Benjamin Klein: Sentinels and Satellites,” Tappeto Volante Gallery, 126 13th Street, Brooklyn, NY. Through May 18, 2025.
About the author: R. Blake Miller is a New York-based art advisor and consultant.
These are WONDERFUL and a great breath of much needed joy, happy color and levity.