Pablo Benzo Presents 'Time Traveler' at The Hole in Tribeca

Daniel Wilson
Sep 23
1 min read

His cubist-inspired creations amalgamate individuals, flora, and objects inside intricate, surreal environments.

The Hole inaugurates "Time Traveler and Other Fragile Detours," the inaugural New York solo exhibition of Berlin-based Chilean artist Pablo Benzo, commencing next Friday at the gallery's Tribeca venue. The exhibition includes five new paintings and six pieces on paper inspired by Peggy Guggenheim's iconic 1940s gallery, Art of This Century, which brought Surrealism and Cubism to New York.

Benzo's oeuvre embodies the avant-garde tradition with a subdued palette of greens, yellows, magentas, and blues. His textured, stippled oils create volumetric forms that obscure the distinction between abstraction and figuration. Interiors transform into theatrical environments where persons, plants, and furniture intertwine. A reoccurring element is the "pancake plant," whose rounded leaves provide rhythmic balance to the settings.

Notable features comprise a canvas depicting a woman observing from her living room adjacent to a painting-within-a-painting of a Modigliani-inspired nude, as well as compositions where sofas and figures coalesce into whimsical, sinuous odalisques. Throughout the series, Benzo manipulates perspective, incorporating “pictures within pictures” that resonate with early Cubism, while redefining it as a “sensory inheritance.”