The Hole is pleased to present Time Traveler and Other Fragile Detours the New York solo debut of Berlin-based Chilean painter Pablo Benzo (b. 1982, Santiago), opening next Friday in our Tribeca space. The exhibition will feature five new paintings and six works on paper, inspired by works from the Peggy Guggenheim collection and her groundbreaking New York gallery Art of This Century. That 1940s venue introduced Surrealism and Cubism to a New York audience hungry for new ideas, and its experimental spirit will be echoed here in the design of the show and in the opening night celebration.
Benzo’s paintings carry that avant-garde spirit forward into the present. Working in brushy, stippled oils with a muted palette of greens and yellows, magentas and soft blues, he builds volumetric, cubist-inspired forms that shift restlessly between categories. Interiors become theatrical stages where figures, furniture, and foliage fold into one another. A favored motif is the “pancake plant,” its near-circular leaves punctuating compositions with biomorphic rhythm. In one of the show’s most compelling canvases, a woman stands in her living room gazing out the window, while beside her hangs a painting of a Modigliani-esque nude — a painting within a painting that turns the domestic space into a layered meditation on looking at and collecting art.
“I’m constantly searching for balance: between abstraction and figuration, softness and structure, silence and suggestion,” Benzo says.
Pablo’s personification is plump, lush and lovely, in And Then She Did What She Did the sofa odalisques with bodily bumps, belly buttons and curves and a flurry of feet underneath. In Memory Lanes a canvas on an easel oscillates between landscape of pink rolling hills and a perky pink bottom. The sumptuous roundness of the forms throughout are balanced with moments of perspective; crisp corners of canvases, window frames, foregrounds and backgrounds. With a sprinkle of logic Benzo makes the surreal start to appear possible.
This interest in nested images and “pictures within pictures” directly recalls Guggenheim’s era of radical reinvention, when artists like Picasso and Braque first destabilized perspective and invited viewers into unstable visual spaces. Benzo embraces that lineage not as mere quotation, but as what he calls a “sensory inheritance.” His compositions allow objects and figures to merge and dissolve, creating an ambiguous space where memory, imagination, and perception intermingle.
