Catalogue essay by Robert Clark for ‘Industrial Relations’ (Vickers Art Award 2006)
The perspectives of Helena Ben-Zenou’s recent paintings imply a lone viewer confronted by the awful grandeur of industrial architecture. The compositional conventions of traditional landscape (conventions ranging from 17th century Dutch painting through Romantic England to the typical picturesque postcards of today) require a compositional formula of a rural topography receding to the horizon and backdrop sky. Such conventions make the viewer feel grounded. Ben-Zenou eradicates such compositional reassurances. Her images are complexes of precipitous disorientations. The ground is replaced with steel ladders and walkways that slant obliquely into a austere darkness or an urban sky of bleached or ashen vacuity. If the ground is anywhere present it tends to be gouged out or piled up into heaps of fuel or waste. The hard-edged geometry is softened only occasionally by stains of soot or smoke. Caged spaces frame each other and recede in an ambiguous layering of depth. These might be highly productive workplaces but the workers are no longer present. There’s no sign of macho camaraderie, no inane strains of Radio One blasting away in the background. Ben-Zenou’s subjects are represented as bold, and sometimes brute, architecture rather than as stage sets for human narratives. The implied lone protagonist is the viewer, or, of course, the artist herself engaged in a kind of ambivalent wonderment, or, as she herself puts it, ‘an informed ambling.’
It’s as if the haunting Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) etchings of the 18th Century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi have been brought up to date in views of Derby’s Pride Park or Test Beds 57 and 58 at the city’s Rolls Royce factory. Yet Ben-Zenou avoids the dreadful, almost Kafkaesque paranoia and alienation suggested in Piranesi’s dreamlike interiors. There might be an ever present uncertainty in Ben-Zenou’s perspectives, but it is an uncertainty that nowhere precludes the possibility of aesthetic delight. To put it simply, her creative venture presents us with an unexpected kind of splendour perceived in the most unlikely of environments.
One might see such 20th century painters of urban landscapes as Edward Hopper and Michael Andrews as precursors. One might sometimes be reminded of the complex interlockings of Stanley Spencer’s paintings of wartime shipbuilding on the Clyde. One might think of Frank Auerbach’s zigzag compositional choreography. One might think back to the eerie, early industrial suspense in some of Derby’s own Joseph Wright’s paintings. Yet none of these quite fit. Maybe Ben-Zenou has more in common with such present day practitioners of deadpan industrial photography as Bernd and Hilla Becher or the mock industrial archaeologies of video artist Patrick Keiller. In any case, searching for historical precedents and contemporary cultural contexts, one is unavoidably struck by the relative paucity of an urban or industrial landscape tradition. Looking around art galleries, one would often be forgiven for concluding that the industrial revolution and the massive spread of our cities had never occurred. I cannot look at Ben-Zenou’s work without being constantly reminded of this fact. Her work exists in such a relative vacuum of comparable images, stretching back for centuries, that one might be tempted to conclude there has been the exercise of some kind of aesthetic or cultural taboo against such imagery. Maybe it is only now that architecture is being once again widely appreciated and debated as a legitimate creative form, that our urban and industrial architectural heritage can be aesthetically recognised.
The paintings enabled by the Vickers Art Award have been produced in response to the description of Derbyshire as ‘a county of contrasts’ in Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s mid 20th century classic study The Buildings of England. It is an undeniable major part of the county’s charm that one can shift from the wilds of the Peak District, the picturesque allure of the River Derwent dales and the historic opulence of Chatsworth House and suddenly find oneself confronted with a quarry that has eaten away half a hillside like some mammoth robotic beast. For many of us, the Peak District’s standing as the second most visited national park in the world is somehow saved from romantic artificiality by the fact that it borders onto so much industrial and post-industrial devastation. After all, the now so quaint redbrick mills of the Derwent valley mark the very instigation of the worldwide Industrial Revolution. The fragmentation of the landscape by industrial exploitation is inescapably part of its distinctive character. We must not forget that the wonderful gardens of Chatsworth were man-made by Capability Brown, who chopped up and redesigned the landscape with the latest technology available.
In response to the Vickers Art Award, Ben-Zenou has decided to concentrate on aspects of the county that are usually ignored or, at best, over-romanticised through the nostalgic tendencies of the heritage industry. It should be stressed that Ben-Zenou is no heritage industry illustrator. She isn’t into celebrating the dignity of labour. She doesn’t paint intriguing industrial ruins. The darkness in parts of her paintings isn’t a moody darkness. She’s no protest-painter. Neither is her work a mere documentary attempt to record features of a vanishing industry. And, despite acknowledging that any industrial imagery might catalyze political ponderings in a viewer that way inclined, neither has she any overt political agenda, even when working from sites associated with the virtually defunct or politically wasted mining industry.
The very surface of Ben-Zenou’s large-scale paintings resists romantic indulgence. She uses industrial paints, often spraying the paint through templates so there are no traceries of her own signature brushwork. Her forms tend to be precisely delineated, sometimes almost clinically divided off from each other to give an outlined, segmented effect. Her images are as immaculately planned out as the products of any architect’s of designer’s computerised drawing board. Not that Ben-Zenou is afraid to get stuck in, to get her hands dirty. Often she paints with the rawest of raw materials borrowed from the sites of her subject matter: limestone dust, marble dust, brick dust, raw clay, steel wool, slate powder, graphite, cement. Her surfaces often take on the tactile rasp of sandpaper. The sprayed forms have something of the spectral anonymity of furtive graffiti. Her colour schemes tend to be a murkily punctuated monochrome. Yet the sheer architectural drama of her compositions imbues such deceptively unappealing elements with a thoroughly engaging and aesthetically exciting tension.
There’s all those crisscross rigs and scaffoldings. There’s a monumental geometry of chimneys and pipes and girders. There are shiny surfaces, rusted and oily surfaces, forbidding walls of sheer steel. There’s the bland visual absorbency of a concrete façade. There’s the juddering rhythm of corrugated iron, the finely tensioned detail of pulleys, the repetitive punctuation of rivets, the caged grids, the deep shadows in barely illuminated mine shafts. There are dwarfed and tunnelling viewpoints and towering viewpoints as if from the top of a crane. Ben-Zenou captures the unlikely yet irresistible visual enchantment we all feel when coming across a partition door opening onto a major building site. This is a rare glimpse of our world momentarily suspended in the process of its making, with all the elaboration of its skeletal framework still showing. These monumental structures are determined by stress factors and gravitational facts of physical necessity. This is a different kind of nature from that to be found on the Peak District mountains, but it is a form of nature nevertheless. Ben-Zenou’s pictures at times remind me of that incomparably vertiginous thrill one feels on walking from Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge towards the towers of Manhattan (if you’ve never done it, it’s one of those things everyone must surely do before they die). It’s the recognition of some kind of primal geometric geography, of 3D formulas for enabling us to interact productively with the elements.
A previous recent project involved the artist working in collaboration with the writer Iain Sinclair and artist Jock McFadyen in an investigation of the architectural and cultural environs of the A13, an arterial road running from Aldgate in London through Essex to Southend and Shoeburyness. Here Ben-Zenou recorded her ‘informed ambles’ with a camera (she is a highly accomplished photographer, but surprisingly generally only uses the results as source material for her studio paintings) as she explored what might be described, in a term reminiscent of Sinclair, as ‘psychic geography.’ What kind of experiential or historical resonance can be contained by a deserted road bisecting a blank industrial wall, a distant view of a riverside wasteland, a deserted nocturnal petrol station, a close-up of a factory security fence, the vacant reflections in the myriad windows of a concrete and glass tower block? If Ben-Zenou’s images have a haunting aura, what exactly are her subjects themselves haunted by? It amounts to a form of mapping out of dirty corners of the world, neglected places, a form of exploratory tourism into places utterly overlooked by the board of tourism, places that might tell us more of our early 21st century state of being than any more obviously attractive destination. Trust an artist to be so contrary, to go looking where no-one else would think of looking.
So, effectively, Ben-Zenou works towards doing what good artists have always done. She makes us look at things we previously have been half-blind to. She reveals the hidden make-up and fabric of significant corners of our environment. She invents new techniques to embody unexplored subjects. She makes us recognise the laws of natural force in the most dramatic of manufactured structures. She makes us see from unprecedented perspectives. She presents images that are so skilfully freed of dogma, or message mongering, or art historical cliché, or easily interpretable illustrated meaning, that they let the viewer’s senses experience the painting’s presence and allow the viewer’s thoughts and imagination to wander away as they will. Finally, Ben-Zenou enables us to see an unpredictable beauty in what might have been shallowly misconstrued by those with less creative insight as the downright pits of ugliness.
Robert Clark
(Artist, Writer for the Guardian newspaper and Senior Lecturer, The University of Derby)