Alexandre Adler
(French historian and essayist on 'Selected Works' at Galerie Foret Verte, Paris, April 2007)
"Occasionally, our gaze captures the essence of things, but only very briefly, in an entirely ephemeral way, like the green ray that can flash for less than a second at sunset. Ben Nason has - through an experimental photography, which echoes the most adventurous painters, from Corot to Hopper - managed to trap the green ray and capture the truth of a moment, as if he had aimed a telescope from a parallel universe onto our own."
"Cela 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 en moins d'une seconde au couchant. Eh bien Ben Nason est parvenu - par une photo expérimentale qui repeint la peinture la plus aventureuse, de Corot à Hopper - à piéger le rayon vert, à capturer la vérité d'un moment, comme s'il avait braqué sur eux un téléscope provenant d'un univers parallèle au notre."
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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