Burn the cities that make us who we are. If there is anything left, it is the ashes and the residues of once and future civilizations. A question that plagues modern science is whether or not information is destructible. If a piece of coal pulverized into dust can be revived into its former incarnation, the same can be asked of individual consciousness: can we be destroyed and then be raised from the dead? Ben Kator’s recent works engage the codified surface of modern life and the consciousness that survives it. In a painting covered with varnish and dark drippings of tar, shades of lightly colored space break through the plane of the picture. A loosely composed stream of words seem to spill onto the canvas, transcibing the lyrics of someone’s incessant thoughts. Kator began to experiment with painting during his studies in England. Many of his earliest works inherited the character of action paintings. Some evoked the mark of Twombly and Pollock. He produced layers of tar and varnish that traveled across the lengths of canvases. These paintings recorded the slow velocities of the layers as they raced to sudden and subtly tragic ends. Untitled, tar, varnish, paint on canvas. Since then Kator’s works have shifted their focus to reflecting the world that surrounds him. In New York, you walk on the streets and just digest so much information, he explains, There’s a disorder that you deal with everyday. His works have absorbed from the city a notion of geometry that attempts to contain that disorder, as if they were imitating its rigid grid of streets and buildings. In an untitled painting, a scattered group of lines and color-blocks intersect each other in crisscrosses that recall Mondrian. Slicks of dark tar whirl over one side of the canvas like the burnmarks of a scorching fire, as fragments of words and sentences trickle along the edges of the resulting forms. A grotesque illumination imagination is scrawled somewhere on the canvas. Untitled, mixed media on canvas It is no coincidence, then, that a certain architectural feel permeates through many of his paintings. Kator uses lines and geometric forms to create a verisimilitude of space in some of his later works. Kator experiments in whites, and vast areas of some of his paintings consist of nothing but lines over negative space. These lines create a rough semblance to blueprints and mechanical plans; they detail some kind of a spatial invention whose functionality can only be guessed. Untitled, mixed media on canvas In other works, Kator distributes colored shapes and splotches over a large area of white, creating metaphors of individuals. Often, these forms appear like apparitions,colors ghosted under layers of glazed white paint. These forms and colors communicate a visual, unintelligible language. They maintain a structure that verges on a secret logic, like the colored knots of ancient Incan quipu. The images that occur are meant to echo coded information, he said, but are loose enough to maintain their plastic qualities, allowing the viewer to read the work while simultaneously impressing their own narrative on it. Kator’s paintings are most affective when they create an echo of the environs that elude the overloaded mind. In a post-modern culture that speaks in bits and blinking neon, his works often succeed in reassembling a fractured reality.