Ben Aronson: Urban Reflections

This season, LewAllen Galleries is presenting “Urban Reflections,” an exhibition featuring new and recent paintings by Ben Aronson that span the built environments of New York, Boston, Venice, Paris, and the Mediterranean coast.

Ben Aronson: Urban Reflections
On view through October 10, 2026
Last Friday Railyard Art Walk Reception: September 25
LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Website: lewallengalleries.com

From the Gallery:
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Aronson’s atmospheric cityscapes operate at the dynamic intersection of gestural expressionism and structural precision. Balancing loose, tactile impasto up close with striking three-dimensional clarity from a distance, his compositions capture the mood and climate of urban life—from daylight breaking through high-rise canyons to taxi headlights reflected on rain-slicked asphalt. Bypassing mere factual description, Aronson leverages light, shadow, and architectural geometry to engage the viewer’s memory and sensory pathways, triggering what art historian Bernard Berenson defined as the “aesthetic moment”—a unique, timeless, and exhilarating sense of total unity between spectator and canvas.
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Aronson’s remarkable achievement lies in exposing the precarious construction of appearances and the conventions through which the visible world coheres. His paintings are apt illustrations of the way the human memory and imagination works, literally and poetically. The critic Donald Kuspit esteemed Aronson’s pictures as “exquisitely painted and emotionally haunting.” This exquisite poignancy stems from what they salvage from the remnants of seeing: his painted world is lush with evocation even as the particular detail of circumstances that render it familiar fade and cease to appear secure in memory. They endure as “aesthetic moments” even as the experiences that gave rise to the memories or dreams fade with time.

Another reason for their ineluctable aesthetic appeal, is their uncanny function as subtle reminders of places and times that carry significance for the viewer. The exquisite abstracted detail of these paintings condense complex narratives of one’s experience into a single frame. The sole image acts as a kind of deep psychological and physiological compendium of experiential anamnesis locking in particular details that trigger broader recollections. In turn pleasurable feelings of nostalgia and reminiscence can arise. Altogether, Aronson’s work’s have attained an exalted position of aesthetic poetics beyond mere mastery of linear perspective and geometric engineering in the realm of built landscape. Indeed, they are superb examples of aesthetic moments available to those who take the time to look closely.
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Trained at Boston University under Philip Guston and James Weeks, Aronson synthesizes Bay Area Figuration with structural draftsmanship. His work is held in over 50 public and institutional collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the Denver Art Museum.

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Announcement prepared for the web by Cherie Dawn Haas, Editor of Fine Art Today