Alexandre Adler
(French historian and essayist on 'Selected Works' at Galerie Fôret Verte, Paris, April 2007)
“...Il arrive que l’essence des choses se livre au regard, mais très brièvement, de manière tout à fait éphémère, comme le rayon vert que l’on peut capter au moins d’une seconde au couchant. Eh bien ! Ben Nason est parvenu par une photo expérimentale qui rejoint la peinture le plus aventureuse de Corot à Hopper, à piéger le rayon vert, à capturer la verité d’un moment, comme s’il avait braqué au eux un télescope provenant d’un univers parallèle au nôtre.
Bravo, de tout cœur, Alexandre Adler...”
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"...Sometimes the essence of things is revealed to the eye, but very briefly, in a completely ephemeral way, like the green ray that can be caught for less than a second at sunset. Well then! Ben Nason has succeeded in trapping the green ray, capturing the truth of a moment, as if he'd pointed a telescope at it from a universe parallel to our own, with an experimental photo that's right up there with the most adventurous painting from Corot to Hopper.
Bravo, from the bottom of my heart, Alexandre Adler..."
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ArtReview
(on SPARE)
In the appropriately titled SPARE (...) light is flattened, washed away, and the neutral plane of a garden’s white gravel ground becomes the theatre, an empty space where the found actors, the cropped bodies of passing men and women barely present in the frame, perform roles as individuals and crowd. Little human dramas abound: a chaotic scatter of soldiers’ legs out of step; a scrum of business-suit trousers chasing their boss’s trousers; the legs of a young couple with matching strides and tattoos; a diptych of a woman, her back to the camera and her head cropped out of both frames, isolated in ever-changing multitudes. Sometimes a figure has stopped to adjust a shoe, or to pose for a camera, or to take a photo of someone else. Beyond this, faceless, stripped to bare minima, they have no more expressive force than the shadows that trail behind them. Both figure and field are robbed of identity – cropped in such a manner that few, if any, identifying traces remain. The images themselves, blown up large, all mid-tone colours pumped away, further diminish the details, lending a uniform anonymity to the unfolding spectacle. Ciphers on the upper margins of the frame, walking shadows drained of particularity, these floating signifiers enter and exit, stage left, stage right, mere players of a tiny yet universal yet barely visible truth – our hour on the stage, with all its incident strut and fret.
Christopher Mooney
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The New York Times
THE New York art world isn't everyone's cup of tea, but few would deny that it is constantly aswirl. Its tea leaves rarely drift to the bottom for perusal and are further agitated by a constant influx of new ones, usually through the ritual of the first solo show (...) At Kerrigan Campbell on East Ninth Street, Ben Nason takes things a little further in landscape images, most of them nocturnal, that have a bit of Crewdsonian bizarreness, but again involve no staging or manipulation...
Making an Entrance at Any Age
Roberta Smith