Allusions to the art-historical, modernist trajectory and the early avant-garde can be found in much of the work of Ben Duax. The muddled distinctions between abstract and representational elements, the peculiar figuration techniques, and the intentionally gratuitous painterly application might serve as an affront to dominant aesthetic values and could also recall the subversive gestures of Albert Oehlen or Asger Jorn. While questions of representation are central to his practice though, Duax’s conceptual strategy carries implications beyond the art-historical sphere.

Made using esoteric source imagery and misapplied content-aware, photo-editing filters, Duax’s canvases are emblazoned with a reactive printing technology that permeates each composition. Ultimately, Duax paints a loosely arranged series of figures and stills drawn from obscure elements in popular culture, global history, and everyday life, a gesture that functions as a concealment or an erasure of the original image and provides the work with distinct registers of recognizability.

The title of the show derives from a rock ballad from 1967 by the UK band The Moody Blues, recently featured in a Bleu De Chanel cologne advertising campaign featuring Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet. The express inclusion of household items like decorative plants, furniture, or clock radios pairs the themes of domestic solitude in the song within the framework of a long history of still-life painting or even the inexplicable representational efforts of abstract actionists like Franz Kline. In the context of its hyper-commercialized mainstream revival, the original lovesick lyrics of the song take on a multitude of potential significations, yet Duax’s process emphasizes the strictly contemporary setting of its popular resurgence.

The images of teacup emojis and a displaced familial couple were sourced from the marketing graphics of the Whatsapp messaging platform at the center of the contentious state of globalized communication channels and implicate emergent techno-neologisms like doom scrolling, trolling, or left on read in Duax’s conceptual project. Developed in the United States, the app itself is currently at the center of a debate surrounding world economics, national security, and information exchange having been created as a direct competitor to the Chinese-owned WeChat. Ultimately though, politics is only part of the purpose of the evasive imagery in Duax’s bemusing but calculated process of extemporaneity and repetition which departs from global issues to ask fundamental questions about how we experience the world today.

Far from rendering simple linear narratives or forthright communicative gestures, Duax’s compositions do not aim towards evocation or verisimilitude and instead pursue a complex depiction of the schisms and convergences of interior and exterior perception and the social sensory indices that unexpectedly interject into our visual interface. In this context, it would seem Duax’s project is as ambitious as the early modernists after all in that each aims toward configuring new models of representing the ever-evolving dynamism of our lived experience.

Originally from the Bay Area in California, Ben Duax works out of New York and Glasgow. He graduated with a BFA from Hunter College in Painting and an MFA from the University of Glasgow. He has appeared in exhibitions at Sleep Center, New York, Gallery 1855 in Davis, CA, The Pipe Factory in Glasgow, Listen Gallery in Glasgow, Stour Gallery in London, Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, and The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA. Nights in White Satin is Ben Duax’s second solo exhibition with Hyacinth.