Informed by dreams and passing visions, misremembered art historical moments, melodies and musical fragments, Benjamin Styer’s recent paintings expand and deepen the artist’s universe with a pervasive sense of improvisational discovery. Working for the past several years in a variety of visual modes and media, all bound to an ever-evolving mythology, the artist finds points of synthesis where geometric projections, ghoulish wanderers, and enchanted musical notes mingle, populating fantastic landscapes and gradated voids. History serves as a source signal for Styer, a devourer of images, folk traditions, and visual tropes; he becomes an interpreter of individual and collective memory, and the uneven terrain connecting the two.

This absorbent approach explains Styer’s capacity for recording the implacable vagaries of the dreamworld; things barely glanced and hardly felt take shape amid escalating self-reference. Styer’s paintings are by turn euphoric, macabre, crowded, geometric, and silent–often at once. His daily practice ensures that the language of his dreams remains fresh and selectively open to the waking world’s more egocentric whims.

Extended looking at Styer’s paintings reveals the integration and interaction of various modernisms like early abstraction and Transcendentalism, folk traditions such as needlepoint and intuitive perspective, and earlier practices like manuscript illumination and devotional painting. Together, Styer’s work identifies uncharted continuities between creative impulses and attitudes functioning outside aesthetic and temporal boundaries, where memories exist before they crystalize. Perhaps this is a uniquely contemporary position, made possible by an unprecedented availability of historical material, and renewed sensitivity to its impact on art-making today; or maybe it owes a debt to the deep-set instinct to look that has always preceded the making of art.

In Mondegreen Codex, for example, a continuous narrative of flying creatures, lost souls, and scattered musical energies unfolds amid multicolored crystal towers and rivers. Overhead, shapes dart around a darkening sky punctuated by black portals. Styer’s familiar motifs move freely through the painting and define its upper and lower margins, where they sit conspicuously embedded. In Awake/Asleep (Angel), the artist isolates one of the many moving pieces in Mondegreen Codex, expanding the motif and implying the potentially enormous scale and inexhaustible fullness of his universe. In Wax Music, Styer subverts an iconic Modernist motif, finding unlikely moments of collision between his vision and a trenchantly historic one. In referencing familiar art historical elements both directly and indirectly, Styer flattens calcified narratives and suggests an egalitarian approach to the art of the immediate and distant pasts.

At the same time, Styer’s paintings allude to mythologies, traditions, and legends that perhaps never existed, but are intuitively readable and immediately relatable. He taps into a hive-unconscious, where thoughts of thoughts and slippery imagery, thumbed through in some dusty book, become embodied and made real in a constantly growing and deepening system. Musical motifs are seamlessly made visual, absorbed and reconstituted throughout the paintings while calligraphy, geometric abstraction, landscape, and surreal vignettes move in step. In the vastness of his world sits a connectivity and pronounced spiritual generosity: with art history, memory, dream, and experience flattened and disrupted, the door to Styer’s thrillingly singular universe creaks open.

Press release and images via Moskowitz Bayse, LA.