Nicholas Metivier Gallery is delighted to announce Snapshot, an exhibition of works on paper by Ben Reeves. Snapshot is Reeves’ third solo exhibition at the gallery.
In Snapshot, Ben Reeves focuses on the fleeting moments of everyday life. Reeves captures these passing images on his iPhone, heightening the sense of immediacy that they convey: the shadow of a streetlight cast on a wall at sundown, a bush of hydrangeas spilling over in full bloom, the beam of floodlights on a soccer pitch at night. Everywhere, Reeves is drawn to the quality of light. He carefully draws viewers into the atmosphere of his paintings by letting it filter across his work.
Reeves transcribes his chosen images onto paper in fine strokes of oil paint. Paper’s inherent ephemerality allows Reeves a certain freedom: the ability to treat the material like a playground for his practice, which echoes the fleeting nature of the scenes he depicts. In Snapshot, Reeves uses his colour palette of purples, pinks, oranges, greens, and blues to elicit a sense of warmth. Despite the source material being crisp iPhone photography, the final images appear hazy or wispy, like a memory.
Ben Reeves will have a painting exhibition at Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Fall 2024.
“I have thought about the paintings as a kind of snapshot and many of them use photos much more closely than most of my larger paintings. They are also diaristic in nature as they reflect my daily experiences of the past year. “ - Ben Reeves
