Effacement Series

Benjamin Grange

Provence, France

 The pieces in this series focus on themes of communication, erasure, censorship

and the struggle for self expression in an alienating moment where the world feels both
increasingly individualized and homogenized.

The compositional basis of this series aims to serve as a metaphor

for the capacity of an ideology, institution or societal structure  to obfuscate our perception of the world as is.

Initially, the inspiration for the forms presented here came from observations of the marks left on a wall

after the covering of graffiti and the appearance of censured text.

These representations of "coverings" or "erasures" reference the implicit or explicit suppression of points of view

not given mainstream attention, as demonstrated by increasingly narrow boundaries

of reasonable political opinion over the past half century,

or the marginalization of non-hegemonic voices in our historical records.

But these "coverings" are exactly that, coverings, and it is impossible to completely eradicate a message

as long as we have human memory and a collective social existence

that is able to function in its natural, dynamic way. 

About the Artist

Working in the south of France, Benjamin Grange is an English artist who creates
abstract paintings in mixed media. As a self taught painter, having been trained in architecture,
his paintings are informed largely by the human landscape explored through abstracted
form and space. Principally, his work draws from ideas of political or social structures
and how they transform our perception of, and communication
within, the physical world.