Benjamin Britton’s paintings use color and space to reflect the mechanisms of sensation in the body, to inspire a feeling of motion or displacement, and to invite the investigation of pictorial space. His research subjects are the representation of ecologies, planetary relations, human emotion, and inquiry into the nature of consciousness and abstraction. His work often proposes a loss of coherency between the knowledge of where and when the observing body is in the landscape and the sensation of its current place in space and time.

For Britton, these topics are visual, “I think we form the conscious present out of the sensed, residual, and formative. By painting how the apprehension of the present is constructed and perceived through layers of representation and abstraction and arranging them in a multitude of prepositional relationships there is an opportunity for a painting to show how the feeling of one’s location is almost always the feeling of multiple locations, among other possible revelatory moments. My work is to reveal a human figuring of ecological conditions; a relational position for humans within the planetary that cannot be calculated or understood through the frame of language or our current civilization. The paintings are about what it looks like for me to think about feelings.”