Review of Pamela Benham’s exhibition -
“Visual Energy: Turning Up the Volume”
  Faulkner East Gallery, Santa Barbara
​       November 2nd - 30th, 2022
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 Pamela Benham, Untitled SBE 30, acrylic, 48” x 36” 
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 Painting into and Out of the Vortex

                  By Josef Woodard
 
True to the title of painter Pamela Benham’s current exhibition in the Faulkner East Gallery, “Visual Energy: Turning Up the Volume” presents and challenges the viewer with a burst and swirl of visual stimuli. Her new body of acrylic-on-canvas works greets the visitor with a pleasantly shocking yet also embracing sensation, in a kind of personalized brand of “action painting” (lower case). The visual volume is often turned to 11, but with its intensity tempered by a signature panache, a consistent formal vocabulary and a heat-infused palette.  

These paintings are by no means wallflowers, but evocative provocations to the eye and other senses, suggesting wave and vortex activity captured in vivid but inherently abstract terms. Through her art, we seem to be glimpsing visualized manifestations of forces found in inner or outer space, stilled (and distilled) in the process of Benham’s expressive touch.

This show is the latest progress report in a long evolutionary arc for the artist, going back to the early 1970s. Moving east to further east to west, Benham’s studies included Cooper Union in New York City to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, with exhibitions on the east coast, in Paris and internationally. She has called Santa Barbara home for nearly twenty years now and expanded her exhibition footprint to California’s central coast, showing often in the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and many another art space in her adopted hometown.

In group shows, Benham’s work tends to stand out as literal “hot spots” in the mix, with an angle on abstraction which involves emotionality and sensuality, unabashed expressions of color, form and of energy, an operative word in Benham’s art-making universe. Whereas other artists’ abstractionist impulses lead from and to cerebral, introspective perspectives, Benham’s paintings unabashedly protrude and burst forth, while also pulling us into their sensual whirlpools—and whorl-pools.

In a review of a 2012 group exhibition, I wrote that, contrasting her gallery mates, Benham’s art managed to be a “flamboyant — and flame-like — expression of unhinged color and gesture. (Her) painting shouts for joy, maybe with a tinge of angst…” The sentiment remains the same, seven years later.
 
Interactive variations on a similar theme and artistic voice are found in her Faulkner show, but with the compressed force and focus which a one-person exhibition can engage. Seen in an ensemble and sequence, these new paintings manage to simultaneously assert an individual persona, one painting to the next, while conspiring to a larger statement: “Visual Energy” could be read as an installation, with an almost narrative overlay, read left to right.

In “Untitled SBE 21,” a palpable sense of heat rises from the study in red-to-yellow, as if a solar flare event translated to optical and emotive terms. “#30” is one of the more visceral and edgy pieces, while in the painting “#36,” yellow, red and purple gestures encircle a pink-ish white null zone, the closest thing to a “void” or color-sucking vortex in a show of densely painted canvases.

Two paintings hang on the back wall, projecting a dual identity: the darker, brooding shades of “#51” yields to the brighter flash and iridescence of “#40.”

At the “tail end” of the exhibition/storm (as read in left-to-right form), the palette shifts.  With “#34,” a deep green hue enters the spectrum and tubular, funnel-like forms gain a clarity in spatial context. Finally, “#14” goes rogue, vis a vis the approach of other paintings in the gallery space. Instead of density of paint or slashing, arcing brushstroke and compositional energies, a sense of liquidity—even a Helen Frankenthaler-ish seeping effect—suddenly prevails here. In its meld of nearly “Klein blue-“ish hue, persimmon orange and sandstone brown, on a white ground, the abstractionist mode shifts to a leaner, earthier bearing.

With this last gentle gesture of a painting amongst louder paintings, the artist leans away from the prevailing post-AbEx approach elsewhere to a softer quality of Ab-impressionism, providing a graceful coda to an exhibition of high-volume catharsis. Her adventures in expressing and harnessing visual energy continue apace.
 

(Josef Woodard is an arts journalist and critic, who has written on art for the Los Angeles Times, Artweek, Santa Barbara News-Press and Santa Barbara Independent, and various art catalogue essays. He has also written on music for DownBeat, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications, and has two published jazz books, as of 2019.)