A series of Small paintings.
Exhibition
Exhibition
Ben Aitken paints like a collector of contradictions: banal and grotesque, comic and unbearable, ordinary and utterly unreal. His portraits hover at the edge of recognition. Ted, Joni, Joe, Fritzl, Ozzy, a kid from Mysterious Skin, even a dispirited man in a hotdog suit, figures bound less by likeness than by the shared absurdity of being human.
The paintings are confrontations, not tributes. Aitken approaches each subject with equal parts irreverence and gravity: the “quiet confrontation” of Ted’s blackened face; Joe from You Were Never Really Here, hollowed by violence; Fritzl’s banal eyes, which would be merely eerie if not weighted by horror; Ozzy, theatrical and excessive, death always at his shoulder. Even the hotdog, dressed for performance yet wholly unimpressed, becomes a synthesis of the whole: ridiculous, evil, joyous, ambiguous, unbearable.
Aitken’s canvas is not just a stage for portraiture but for the performance of looking itself. Every image carries the echo of what came before. Screen roles, tabloid headlines, crimes, clichés, the theatre of celebrity and shame. The stillness of his works is deceptive; they are charged with the excess of cultural memory, shadows thick with the absurdities and offences of living.
What emerges is a strange human chorus, a tragicomedy in fragments. Aitken holds together the joy, the banality, the mystery, and the violence of being alive, only to suggest that none of it quite adds up. The human condition, dressed up and ridiculous, is no less unbearable.
