David Benjamin Sherry

Morán Morán presents the closing event of David Benjamin Sherry's New Moon exhibition.

David Benjamin Sherry’s artistic journey, spanning two decades of traversing the American West, living in his car, and exploring geological extremes like Death Valley and Glacier National Park — all to capture the immense meeting of elements that have opened eyes to the continent’s immaculate disappearing natural environments, has culminated in his latest works. Since relocating to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2021, he has honed his technical skills and channeled his profound understanding of color and form into creating captivating oil paintings on canvas.

These paintings, like his acclaimed photography, offer a unique perspective on landscapes, using vividly colored monochromes to depict natural environments devoid of human presence. This exhibition is a testament to his ongoing exploration of non-lens-based graphic abstractions, manifested in his collection of photograms (2012-2017), published in Pink Genesis.

This shift in Sherry’s material approach also presents a critical recalibration of perspective. Rather than depicting what is directly in front of him, as in his expansive color photographs, Sherry’s latest work presents the natural world as something not only to bear witness to but to be felt: a revelatory event happening to their creator. Pairing these otherworldly, painted mystical abstractions alongside a series of monochromatic, large-scale 8×10 film photographs of billowing cumulus clouds, each bathed in his signature saturated tones, Sherry unites that which is atmospheric, ethereal, and symbolic, ultimately developing a visual language that departs from realism while maintaining a sense of the sublime.

New Moon, the title of his exhibition, references an astrological event when the moon is between the Earth and the sun in its orbit, causing the moon’s dark side to appear invisible in the sky. This phase marks the beginning of the moon’s cycle, and in this way, Sherry’s work points to the renewal of the self, a rebirth of light after a period of darkness. It is simultaneously about that which is visible to the naked eye and a realm of possibilities that lie in what we cannot see, the frontier between the known and the unknown.

These new paintings, says Sherry, “are indebted to the color of the photographs and of my time spent looking into the sky and looking into myself, longing for a connection to the universe, looking for answers.” Like the paintings featured in his 2022 exhibition, poignantly titled Gloria, these abstract and minimal landscapes reflect the artist’s desire to communicate an internal sense of landscape, the topography of the mind—a delirium of intangible territory even more challenging to map than any National Park.

— Morán Morán