Interview: Artist Benjamin Styer on His Fantastical Worlds

A wondrous showcase of form and color at NADA Miami 2023 with LA’s Moskowitz Bayse gallery

To gaze upon the painted works of Massachusetts-based fine artist Benjamin Styer is to leave the white walls of galleries or art fairs and arrive within colorful depictions of fantastical worlds or rhythmic patterns. Styer’s transportive pieces have found their own devout Instagram audience, as well as a home with the critically acclaimed LA gallery Moskowitz Bayse where, in 2021, the artist presented Crystal Piano Rain, a solo exhibition populated with wonder and imagination, and followed it up with the solo show Letters from the Black Hours this September. An ever-growing list of accolades includes a 2022 acquisition by the Dallas Museum of Art for their permanent collection, two appearances at the Dallas Art Fair (including one dubbed Sleepwalker’s Encyclopedia), a featured presence on the online art marketplace Platform, as well as the transformation of his work into the mystical 1,000-piece Mondegreen Codex puzzle.

For this Miami Art Week, Styer will showcase four pieces—”Dragonfly Mailbox Key ‘23,” “Ahornbaum Sugar Shack,” “Red Hand Cabinet” and “Midnight Wafers 2″—at NADA Miami 2023 with Moskowitz Bayse. These works are an exquisite representation of the artist’s style and the fair makes for an ideal occasion to get up close and see the nuance of his work. In advance of his Miami debut, we spoke with the artist to learn more about these four works, which are imagined as a series of “lost” poster designs and reference the style of German folk art, medieval manuscripts and graphic design from Japan in the ’70s.

What’s your art origin story? Where did it all begin?

One of my earliest memories was from preschool and feeling like art was the most exciting thing. I was obsessed with the art in children’s books. Soon after, when I was still very young, I fell in love with hyper-real painting. I wanted to be able to paint things in a hyper-real way. It was a total frustration and it’s been a long unraveling process of not being able to get it quite right.

I was doing music concurrently. I was switching off between painting and music through the years. I didn’t paint seriously until I was about 25. Around 2015, I picked it back up. I felt reinvigorated. There was a sketchbook that I was working on that became an abstract story and I felt like I could make it forever. It was an idea generator visually.

You have such a developed style. Can you share a little bit about how it came to be?

I’ve had a forever-relationship with making art. I was never trained in painting, but when I was a teenager, I began experimenting with paint; my mother’s friend Phoebe Ann Erb, a collage artist and bookmaker, gave me lessons in making books and showed me her collections of scraps for collage—a library of binders full of cut-outs she’d accumulated over decades. Her practice was to collect, cut and glue. My work absorbed a collage-ethic from her that still serves as a backbone for the pictures I want to make.

Let’s talk about materials.

I’ve been thinking about mixing colors and how to make things look like light since I was a child. I’ve always used acrylic. I’ve never used oils; though, that’s something I will at one point approach. I rarely think about medium. Acrylic has for a long time been my direct access tool to make things look like light. It feels second-nature—I forget entirely that it is tubes of plastic polymer. For a lot of artists, medium plays into the meaning of their work intentionally, but I forget that my work has a medium more often than not, and I like to think material has something to say about itself, but the point to me is to see beyond it.

One of the most compelling attributes of your work is your understanding of and relationship to color. You incorporate such a broad spectrum.

Color and light are feeling. They bring joy on a basic, instinctual level. I think there’s a language to it, in the way that they are on top of or try to ignore darkness. There is definitely a parallel to emotions in the way I use color, and how I am responding to emotions and how I want to tamper with my emotions. When I use a rainbow, or every color, it’s usually because I am trying to say everything. It’s why I use the alphabet it my paintings. I am not a writer, there’s too much to articulate. Rather than articulate it, I use the whole alphabet to convey that there are countless things that can be said. When I use every color, it’s implying that these colors say different things.

Would you say the same about musical notes? You have a history of incorporating musical notes into your work.

I really want my paintings to be like music. Music is the kingdom that I can’t figure out how to get into. There’s a connection that cannot be articulated. Synesthesia is a practice for me and I have visual impulses. I feel like they matter but I also know they’re creations in my brain. I pretend, in my art, that there’s a science to it. There are all these mysteries about music that are tangled up in my work.

Your work is highly conceptual. Do you begin with a vision? A mark? An idea?

It’s a pool that I dip into. It’s like it was already there. A lot of the things that I paint are part of my life, or artifacts that have returned. Painting is like meditation. Things float into your head when you allow them to. If you decide that they are important, they can serve as subject matter. When I start, I either know that the work will be on a landscape—a Boschian landscape, that’s a safe haven for me, with that lighting—or it will be a schematic or a design. There’s a lot of value to me in pure design—textiles, patterns, quilts.

Do you ever feel a sense of completion? Or that you can tinker forever?

When I start a painting, I have a general idea of how I will fill the space. In terms of subject matter, I know that I want it to remain open-ended. These are the two considerations. There has to be a balance between being finished and never being finished to me. I have to let go.

What role has social media played?

Instagram is basically what made me and made me available. In 2015, when I started painting again, I got an Instagram and started posting. The posts and the feedback or lack of feedback, or the biting failure, was also a driving factor. Instagram is very useful. There are thousands of talented artists. It wasn’t working for me for a long time but I feel like it’s an illusion. In a few years, I don’t know where Instagram itself will be or how much engagement I’ll get. I got a gallery because of Instagram. Moskowitz Bayse found me because Jerry Saltz reposted my work.

Have you been surprised by your success so far?

I had a degree of confidence that my art was going somewhere and that I was in touch with. As far as success goes, I am learning that it is trickier. I was really surprised that Dallas bought my painting. I didn’t know if anyone was going to understand that painting. But that is only one success. Still, I am surprised and humbled.

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