"Benzo’s paintings carry that avant-garde spirit forward into the present. Working in brushy, stippled oils with a muted palette of greens and yellows, magentas and soft blues, he builds volumetric, cubist-inspired forms that shift restlessly between categories. Interiors become theatrical stages where figures, furniture, and foliage fold into one another. A favored motif is the “pancake plant,” its near-circular leaves punctuating compositions with biomorphic rhythm. In one of the show’s most compelling canvases, a woman stands in her living room gazing out the window, while beside her hangs a painting of a Modigliani-esque nude — a painting within a painting that turns the domestic space into a layered meditation on looking at and collecting art.
“I’m constantly searching for balance: between abstraction and figuration, softness and structure, silence and suggestion.”
Pablo’s personification is plump, lush and lovely, in And Then She Did What She Did the sofa odalisques with bodily bumps, belly buttons and curves and a flurry of feet underneath. In Memory Lanes a canvas on an easel oscillates between landscape of pink rolling hills and a perky pink bottom. The sumptuous roundness of the forms throughout are balanced with moments of perspective; crisp corners of canvases, window frames, foregrounds and backgrounds. With a sprinkle of logic Benzo makes the surreal start to appear possible.
This interest in nested images and “pictures within pictures” directly recalls Guggenheim’s era of radical reinvention, when artists like Picasso and Braque first destabilized perspective and invited viewers into unstable visual spaces. Benzo embraces that lineage not as mere quotation, but as what he calls a “sensory inheritance.” His compositions allow objects and figures to merge and dissolve, creating an ambiguous space where memory, imagination, and perception intermingle".
Kathy Greyson, NYC 2025.