Giant bottle caps and landscapes from the future: the precise and abstract painted world of Ben Sanders

We all have those things that we loved to collect as a kid, that we might still be holding on to or hoarding. For Ben Sanders, it’s bottle caps. “I have always been a collector of all sorts of things, and I still am to this day,” the artist tells us. As he’s kept hold of a collection of his most loved bottle caps, it came quite naturally to the painter to look to these small metal objects for inspiration for his recent series of enamel paintings on large cap-shaped canvases.

“When the series started they were ways to re-contextualise found design imagery that I appreciated. Now they have more or less become substrates for graphic paintings of my own design,” Ben says. “I see the bottle caps as just different versions of canvas for painting.” The process for the making of these works is “much like painting a car” Ben explains, but before any colour is involved, each canvas is made out of a single sheet of steel in his father’s metal workshop (where Hollywood sets have been designed and fabricated for over 30 years), to crimp the material carefully into bottle caps ready to be doused in colour.

Magnifying this industrial everyday form and celebrating it with many unique graphic adornments, isn’t the only thing the artist has been busy working on. Ben’s ongoing series of acrylic and water-based works on canvas, Atom and Siren, have been a way for him to explore humanless spaces and depict “scenes of earth that exist far into the future,” — something that his visual output has been loosely connected by in the last three or four years.

Tired by the current moment of “hyper-individualism and technologically mediated self-obsession”, Ben’s paintings are a break from the everyday – abstract, humanless spaces, that are simply a playground to explore the different possibilities of paint. Crafted with a variety of techniques: “precision masking, spraying with multiple types of spray guns, flooding, sanding, washing and layering”, these collections of precise paintings are often mistaken for digital works upon first impression, the artist tells us.

With such a high quality of finish, Ben aims to explore how far he can push his painting techniques to create these abstract scenes. Questioning: “How do I apply paint in an abstract way that might cause the viewer’s brain to relate what they are seeing to a familiar visual experience? At the same time, how can I imbue the image with elements that cause the viewer to question what exactly is going on?”, in order to constantly be switching from the familiar to the alien.

Speaking to his use of colour in the works, Ben is open to learn from “the masterful colour combination on a soda can as much as from a Van Gogh painting”. A collector and self proclaimed “flea market fiend”, he is inspired by ephemera and trinkets from the past as much as our digital era. The painter aims to make work “that looks like it was made here and now” — situated somewhere in a saturation of colourful images we are bombarded with everyday. On his many shades of inspiration, the artist concludes: “Influences from all the different visual codes of our time (more than ever before in human history) are all equally valid [...] I would say I am an avid follower of most corners of the visual universe; art, design, architecture, furniture, fashion, cars, products, tech, advertising, on and on. I am an Instagram-aholic. I am a sponge person, always ready to look, look, look at anything and everything.”