Sentinels and Satellites

Tappeto Volante is pleased to present Sentinels and Satellites, a solo exhibition of “electric” oil paintings by Canadian-American, Brooklyn-based artist Benjamin Klein, featuring a selection of works from 2013 to the present. In this series, Klein conjures a fantastical world populated by a riotous menagerie of animal protagonists—mice, spiders, sharks, dinosaurs, radioactive swans, peppermint snails, psychedelic flowers, wolf-fox-dog hybrids, and fluorescent toucans. These creatures inhabit surreal, densely painted environments scattered with confetti moons, spectral forests, diaphanous waterfalls, and ominous rivers. Executed in expressive impasto and luminous washes reminiscent of Morris Louis’s “stain” technique, the work employs a saturated, often cartoonish palette that both invites and unsettles—drawing viewers into vibrant surfaces that gradually reveal layered psychological depth. In Klein’s earlier paintings, these animal figures often lingered at the periphery; here, they take center stage, assuming symbolic, even iconic roles. In works like Sitter, Torch, and Faafo, they verge on portraiture. Faafo - a wry acronym for “fuck around and find out”- features an ultramarine mouse with glassy eyes poised on a tuft of grass, facing a spider dangling from outer space, while a polka-dot shark bursts through the sea behind, scattering it into a shimmer of confetti. Above, a pictographic Saturn hovers, evoking a watchful drone. The composition reads as a veiled self-portrait—an allegory of risk, curiosity, and the unforeseen consequences of creative pursuit. Painting, for Klein, is both process and revelation—the terrain where one experiments, seeks, and discovers. Klein’s visual language—rich in recurring motifs and symbolic forms—constructs a reality that is at once surreal and emotionally charged. His images pulse with mythic ambiguity, and the result is a dreamlike ecosystem teeming with ancient archetypes, invisible forces, and a subtle sense of potential looming collapse. At first glance, the work can seem playfully ironic. The vibrant palette and familiar motifs evoke storybooks or dream sequences: elusive, symbolic, emotionally resonant, and hard to decode. “This isn’t a dream,” Klein says, “but it flows from the experience of dreaming.” His images reflect that state—charged, open-ended, and dense with meaning. But the tone quickly shifts into something deeper and more complex: a haunting adult playfulness emerges—at once tender and uncanny. The animals become more than characters; they transform into landscapes, totems, and creatures that inhabit a possible spirit world. The exhibition title itself, Sentinels and Satellites, reflects the duality at the heart of Klein’s universe. Sentinels stand watch; satellites orbit and transmit. His fantastical animal forms seem to do both—stationary yet hovering, protective yet inscrutable. Are they observers or guardians? Or perhaps symbolic tools, not tied to narrative, but to the act of painting. Rather than following a traditional storyline, Klein’s work invites viewers to abandon linear interpretation and instead immerse themselves in imaginative possibilities and the physicality of the surface. Though plotless, the paintings conjure an unmistakable mood: depopulated and post-human, possibly post-apocalyptic landscape. These works feel like cherished childhood toys and figures misplaced into a disorienting dream—a psychedelic fairytale gone strange. They’re akin to the darkest fables for children, lullabies whispered at the edge of disaster, erasing the line between adult and child audience. Importantly, Klein avoids the trap of postmodern cynicism. He doesn’t mock sincerity—he reinvents it. “The self,” he proposes, “is already the largest metaphor.” Within that framework, irony gives way to emotional gravity, and play becomes a form of belief—an act of resistance against detachment. Klein’s influences span a wide range of symbolic and surrealist image-makers. One might sense the mysticism of Odilon Redon, the enchanted jungles of Henri Rousseau, or the intimate cosmologies of Forrest Bess. There are also echoes of Charles Burchfield’s psychic topographies, Paul Klee’s symbolic abstraction, and Philip Guston's last, dark visions. Like these artists, Klein builds immersive psychological worlds. Sentinels and Satellites invites viewers into a luminous, unstable cosmos—a space where fairytale turns into omen, color becomes language, and the viewer is no longer just looking—the world is looking back. Benjamin Klein was born in Chicago and grew up in Montreal, Quebec. A US and Canadian dual citizen, he holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal and an MFA from the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Ontario. His paintings depict a rich but ambiguous landscape of fabulist scenery, environments, flora and fauna. Hallucinatory colors and unexplained, improbable shifts in scale and questionable object permanence add to the charged atmosphere, and quietly poetic dramas that unfold in multiple interpretative directions. The work invokes both comedy and tragedy, but tends toward the holistic, and toward healing, of both the pictorial space, and the apprehension. Selected recent exhibitions include solo presentations at Sunny NY in NYC, One River Gallery in Montclair and Clark, NJ, and Galerie Simon Blais in Montreal, QC. Klein lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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