Ben Borden: 011524 — GRAY ON GRAY

Ben Borden
011524, 2024
Active chemical reaction suspended in bio-polymer, steel, machined acrylic
23 ¼ x 16 ½ x 1 ½ inches

Ben Borden’s work approaches image-making through the alchemical life of color. Before the image making of photography, a painting’s pigments were themselves products of representational transformation: minerals, organic matter and chemicals brought into visibility through exacting recipes and acts of transmutation. Borden reactivates these modalities not as passive carriers of form but as an autopoetic system.

Rather than composing an image through depiction, Borden constructs the conditions under which one can emerge. Through reaction and duration, color precipitates into form and chromatic shift begins to cohere as image. What appears is not a fixed representation but a material event.

In this sense, the work can be understood as a painting animated from within. Its pictorial field is not arranged, but set into motion by the very substances that constitute it in a feedback of tool as subject and subject as tool. Borden gives agency back to these essentialized modalities, allowing the image to arise through their internal logic while still being held within the frame of artistic judgment. The result is a work in which painting’s alchemical inheritance is not cited historically, but made active again - sensuous, unstable and perpetually in the process of coming into view.

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Ben Borden (b. 1985, Corpus Christi, Texas) is an artist based in Los Angeles whose work uses industrial processes and organic materials to build systems of control and preservation. His practice moves across installation, fabrication and research, often engaging the tensions between technology, environment and faith. Borden has exhibited at venues including NOON Projects, Getty Research Center, the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Transmediale Festival. He teaches in the Media Design Practices MFA program at ArtCenter College of Design.