We are all equal before a wave.
--
The art of Benjamin Bubb.
Visual spectacle on the main road heading South. A blue sky slowly gets stacked up with vertical piles of gray-white chaos. Tiny beams of sunlight penetrate the few remaining openings. Not long before this beautiful show of nature get’s washed away from my windshield.
It must have been about five years since I first met the artist Benjamin Bubb (°1992) in his studio in Ghent, Belgium. There I got to know his visual work, mainly large canvases with both dynamic and modest sea views. It was an experimental setting when I visited him back then. There were cloths in the oven and he used special pigment that partly reflects light. The sublime nature of his work has lingered ever since that first encounter in my visual memory. Now was the time for a second visit to this young artist, more focussed and determined to write a piece about him and his work. The core theme remained the same, only the studio location has changed to Welden, south of Ghent.
Since his first major duo exhibition with Rik Moens in 2012 (commissioned by Jan de Nul Group Inc.), Brit-Belgian Bubb has not been idle. Among other things, he exhibited works of Hawaiian landscapes commissioned by the European Commission in London (Beyond black — Beyond white, 2018), a series of Maltese sea views in Zebrastraat in Ghent (2016) and made numerous artistic journeys to Siberia, Hawaii, Cagliari and his homeland Plymouth on the South coast of England. He often explored the boundaries of several artistic disciplines. He made sound recordings such as White noise 4 deaf ears (2018), which he exhibited together with visual work and released on vinyl in a limited edition. It was exhibited at the London Re-center last september.
In Malta (2017) he shot the short film Dream Box Deluge capturing the process of a storm at three different moments. He has also collaborated with Johan Tahon and Rik Moens, among others. As an artist, he cannot be properly categorized. His…
