Benjamin Senior

Perhaps what is unsettling in my formalist approach is that I use the human figure as material for a rhythmic tableau, and in this way the figures walking the streets are no different to the mannequins in the shop windows. All are parts in a machine, and by implication so are we.

Painted using the early Renaissance technique, egg tempera, the image is gradually built up over dozens of thin layers. Over time the colours are carefully tuned; figures and elements are painted, repainted, revised and swapped out until all the elements synergise with one another. It’s like solving a puzzle, sometimes taking weeks or months before all the pieces fit into place. The result is a highly choreographed frozen moment. Tempera painting brings a hard-edged stillness to the image, which I seek to counter by introducing optical tensions such as repetition (rows of mannequins), patterns and shifts of scale (background posters).

Stanley Spencer has certainly been a long time influence on me – the classicising gaze that he casts onto the everyday world, the formal inventiveness. I’m particularly interested in the psychology of Spencer’s paintings – he paints scenes of camaraderie and yet the figures are detached from one another. They rarely touch, and instead they’ll tend to interact via an object or shared activity. In this show I depict scenes of being lone together, figures alienated while coexisting in a crowd.

A deeper influence on me has been the French Modernist artist Jean Helion, whose late figurative works focus on celebratory street scenes with mannequins and flea markets. His figurative work is illustrative and abstract – clarity and control are favoured over expressiveness in order to create an orderly, multi-layered unity of form, colour, and light.

More generally, my work is conversant with painting in the Classical tradition – that is, the tightly composed work that stems from the bas reliefs of ancient Roman frieze and further back still. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, I combine the Classical temperament with a very contemporary vernacular.

– Benjamin Senior