Twice in a While

Press Release

Opening Thursday, January 8, 6-8pm

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Twice in a While, Felix Benton’s first project space exhibition with the gallery and first solo show in New York. 

Twice in a While presents a series of ten small paintings that are held together by the coexistence of clarity and chaos, and the interplay between thought and action. Forms recur with variation, colors are altered or held in place, and each painting unravels with its own set of concerns. At times, Benton starts a piece with a figurative composition, often the organic forms of his hometown, Marfa, Texas, but more often, the painting is redirected by what line, form, and color make possible on the surface.  

Benton and his canvases enter into a cyclical chain of cause and effect, where a form or color provokes a thought, the thought provokes a gesture, and the gesture leads to a new layer. Resolution is not imposed, nor is there an attempt to arrive at a final image. Instead, meaning is left to sit within small decisions–the red paint visible at the edge of Die Meister, or the faint lines that persist among the green surface of Dust devil. Rather than pointing beyond the picture plane, the paintings remain anchored in the immediacy of their own making, urging you to look, closely. 

In an age of seamless digital imagery, increasingly measured and consumed in seconds, Benton’s work insists on a different scale of attention. The fragmented, folded, and textured surfaces resist simple interpretation and explore how images can stir sensation, memory, and imagination, without collapsing into narrative or representation. Here, painting becomes an anti-portal: a tangible object that commands the present, and teaches you, in small ways, how to see. 

Felix Benton (b. 2000, El Paso, TX) is a painter working between Marfa, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2023, with a concentration in Nature, Culture, and Sustainability Studies. Benton has had a solo presentation at Do Right Hall in Marfa, Texas, and participated in group exhibitions throughout Texas, New York, and Rhode Island. He has worked as a studio assistant for Charline von Heyl, Magalie Guérin, and Duane Slick, and served as an assistant curator at Ballroom Marfa.