TRUDY BENSON: XSTATIC

"The seemingly abstract iconography of Benson, with its straight and incidental references to the trajectory of modernist painting, redefines the very concept of abstraction. With its conventional medium, that iconography translates as implicit commentary upon our digitally conditioned and highly mediatized cultural reality."

- Raphy Sarkissian in "Trudy Benson’s Variegated Iconography"

"With their vibrant coloration and quirky facture, these works of Benson have redirected Neoplasticism and Action Painting toward our digitally conditioned present-day reality. Through implicit references to the lexicons of contemporary practitioners of painting, the subtext of Benson’s paintings draws our attention to the impact of technology upon culture."

- Raphy Sarkissian in "Trudy Benson’s Variegated Iconography"

"The feelings we sense when we encounter a painting from Benson’s XSTATIC series may be nature tessellated by architecture. Yet those feelings perhaps bring us closer to abstract painting’s own iconographic register that has been accruing since the outset of the twentieth century and has taken on diverse routes in our postmodern times, what Jean Baudrillard has characterized as our 'era of simulation.' Within the variegated iconography of Trudy Benson, the simultaneity of order and disarray, along with the coexistence of classicism and romanticism, gives way to a sense of elation as we ascertain the formalist distinctions of a given painting, distinctions that nonetheless mirror our irrevocably transformed media-saturated reality."

- Raphy Sarkissian in "Trudy Benson’s Variegated Iconography"