Juxtapoz Magazine – Fever Dream by Ben Quinn and Robert Falco @ pt.2 Gallery, Oakland

In the way heat rises from a distance, displacing objects from order, the paintings of Ben Quinn and Robert Falco function like the moiré of a screen— revealing that vision itself exceeds our ability to capture it. The works in Fever Dream collapse the spiritual realm between experience, sensation, and observation; and grasp at the conditions of the present— an attention economy built on images and multitasking.  

Occupying many worlds at once, Falco’s entropic diptychs bloom and deteriorate simultaneously, selectively revealing and concealing themselves like a vespertine flower. 

With a prismatic palette, Quinn considers the star as essential unit of measurement — of both atomic and cosmological proportions, a means of calculating the unquantifiable.  Colors reverberate, presenting both an entrance and an exit, inviting us to look in as opposed to at. 

There is a reverence for the mundane that materializes in the artists’ source imagery: digital detritus mined from their personal photographic archives. With sleight of hand each artist obfuscates this accumulated visual excess and makes it something worthy of veneration — iconographic.

While Falco’s painting pulse with the urgent demands placed on the mind and body by our undulating, networked economy, Quinn’s work provides a place for the body to rest while the mind is on mute— sharing in the desire to imbue meaning where meaning has been emptied. —Ariella Robinson