Artist Statement

For over thirty years, I designed brand image graphics in Santa Monica. While supervising print jobs, I discovered make-readies—test sheets with unintentional layers of ink from disparate, unrelated jobs. These captivated me and became the foundation for my visual exploration beyond my day work.

The iterative process that grew from my digital design experience became what enthralls me still—the excitement of discovering variations while essentially improvising, not unlike a jazz musician.

Both sides of my education—degrees in art history, painting and drawing, and communication design with decades of offset printing experience—converged into something fresh and exhilarating. A doorway into the art world.

I've always been drawn to repetition and variation—Monet painting the same haystack again and again, capturing different light and moments. Or Warhol repeating Marilyn's face in shifting colors. Monet chased something almost spiritual in perception; Warhol took a different approach, intentionally stripping away emotion into flat advertising sensibility. My work lives somewhere between those impulses, occupying mostly the abstract part of the spectrum.

Using typography in design, I was fascinated with how layered fonts became fragments interacting with images. This became my visual language. I called this work "well-involved vacant structures," after seeing a press sheet fragment with words relating to firefighting. "Well-involved" suggested the multitude of layered imagery; "vacant structures" implied the abstract nature of mostly indecipherable messaging.

I later realized "make-ready" echoed Duchamp's "readymades"—unintentional, but a wink to art history. Whereas Duchamp took finished everyday objects and declared them art through recontextualized appropriation, I use abstract fragments never meant to be seen together, finding inspiration in what was destined for recycling.

Each series began as a singular work. The iterations exist as digital files awaiting the printing of editions.

–Benj Čziller, Ojai CA