TABLEAU "DARK KNIGHT, BREAKING NEW" by Benjamin SPARK (1969) - Lot 215

Lot 215
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Estimation :
600 - 800 EUR
TABLEAU "DARK KNIGHT, BREAKING NEW" by Benjamin SPARK (1969) - Lot 215
TABLEAU "DARK KNIGHT, BREAKING NEW" by Benjamin SPARK (1969) Mixed media on canvas, signed and titled on back. Size: 100 x 70 cm Good condition In the beginning, then, is Benjamin Spark, the hidden son who falls into your lap, already an adult, his mind and paintbrush in turmoil, perfectly foreign yet strangely familiar. "As the critic and novelist Guy Scarpetta likes to say, "The great artist is the one who wasn't in the program. As the son of Pop and Street Art, he embodies an unprecedented reconciliation of two street cultures, one high, the other low, an unlikely but inevitable meeting of two movements driven by antagonistic forces. He is undeniably a genre painter, focusing on the picturesque of everyday life, but seen through the eyes of a very specific category of individuals: superheroes, whose concept he adopts in a very Warholian way, considering their supreme power to strike spirits and penetrate all layers of consciousness. Superman is as good as Mao, the Chanel logo is as good as John Lennon, and Spark adds to them the idols of his generation, Basquiat, Daft Punk or SpongeBob SquarePants. Spark admits: "Batman means a lot to me. He's the only one without superpowers. To make up for that, he's worked on body and mind in a sense of union and harmony.And what's more, he's humble." One recognizes an influence from Gudmundur ERRÓ and they met in 2011 in his Paris studio. Erro emphasizes: "Benjamin Spark is someone who really knows how to draw and who has also evolved a lot. I've only known him for three years, but in my entire career - and I'm eighty-three! -he's the only artist who's ever come to my studio to explain how he works. Normally, painters keep their little secrets to themselves. But he explained everything to me. How he makes enlargements, how he projects them like slides on a screen, without hiding anything from me. It's the first time in my life that I've been able to get inside an artist's head in this way. He came with his computer, and I had the intuition that he'd show me a bit of the day after! We artists are always preoccupied with the future, with what comes next, but also with the idea that everything has been done, that nothing is possible anymore, and so this future is on the dotted line."
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