Nashville artist Benji Anderson was painting a massive, mandala-like mural on the floor of Elephant Gallery in North Nashville when the 30th annual Outsider Art Fair opened in New York. Annie Armstrong covered the fair opening for Artnet, outlining the history of the outsider art genre and focusing on the respected niche it’s created for itself over the past three decades. The definition of outsider art has evolved over time, but nowadays it’s a catchall term for art made by self-taught creators who are “outside” of the academic and commercial infrastructure of the contemporary art establishment. Benji Anderson is the son of Joel Anderson, founder of Anderson Design Group, and he’s the brother of local artist David Onri Anderson. But Benji opted not to go to college, and his wild, vibrant and densely detailed works vibrate with improvisational energy, idiosyncratic stylings and hallucinatory imagery that make them a good fit for outsider subcategories like “intuitive art” and “visionary art.”
Elephant Gallery features lots of artists who are self-taught — or at least less traditionally educated — and Anderson’s exhibition serves as a great reminder of what the gallery did best before the pandemic. The Fitful Portal is an immersive display including a selection of large multimedia works on paper, Anderson’s signature drawings on Etch A Sketch toys, and that huge, colorful floor mural to really pull the room together. The gallery design recalls other displays in the space where artists have created floor-to-ceiling environments, playing to Elephant’s large storefront window. The best Elephant shows are over-the-top happenings that push viewers’ expectations of what an art exhibition should look like and how art can be displayed, and that’s exactly what Anderson does here.
The floor mural is painted in vibrant hues of gold, pink, blue and brown. Elements like stars, leaves, hearts and diamonds can be discerned, but it reads like a purely abstract concentric design that Anderson referred to as a “whirlpool” when we chatted before the show’s opening reception. The mural recalls both mandala designs and the psychedelic stylings of the acid-dipped 1960s. Exhibition visitors can’t enter the show without stepping all over what Anderson calls his “biggest painting ever.” The mural acts as a rug-pull of do-not-touch gallery culture — until it’s inevitably painted over for the next show, disappearing like a Buddhist sand painting.
The exhibition’s title piece, “Mandala/The Fitful Portal,” is a large watercolor-and-graphite work on paper. Anderson told me it took him 80 hours to hand-mix his colors and paint his mural on the floor, and the intense detailing of “Mandala/The Fitful Portal” looks practically as laborious. This work glows with circles-within-circles of yellow, pink and green designs that create an intense spiraling effect that made me anxious even when I was just looking at a picture of it on my phone. It’s a trippy piece, and viewers can spend an afternoon closely examining every tiny gesture and line conspiring in its vertiginous effect.
Druggy designs are a highlight here, but most of the show is packed with strange creatures and weird plants, populating eerie scenes in absurd other-worlds. In the Outsider Art Fair report on Artnet, Armstrong mentions the late, great singer-songwriter-outsider-artist Daniel Johnston. Anderson’s scenes can be Johnston-esque in their jam-packed compositions of colorful, cartoonish characters. But Anderson’s art is more … well, fitful — he jumps through numerous styles in single works, and mixes his media in squalls of crayon, pastel, watercolor, marker, pencil, ballpoint pen and more.
“Tread on the Trail” may be the wildest piece in a show packed with wacko works. The piece evokes some forgotten creation myth with a menagerie of crazy creatures that reference cartoon history — a weird pink tiger is stylized like a 1930s Max Fleischer cartoon, and a pair of little fawns are straight out of Disney. A palm tree waving in the background is adorned with meticulously detailed greenery and textured bark, but some animals in this tableau have eyes and noses indicated only by single dots. The weirdness of the scene — combined with Anderson’s chaotic expressions — can be slightly disturbing, but the artist’s bright, buoyant palette helps balance the work’s more unsettling undertones. No bad trips here, man.
The show also includes a collection of Anderson’s Etch A Sketch drawings, with the iconic red toys handsomely arranged on a single row on a slanted viewing shelf. It’s a great display, and the Etch A Sketch works look even more impressive grouped as a whole. Anderson teamed up with Extended Play Press to release his Etchings book of drawings on toy screens in 2019. The works have become something of a signature for the artist — not only because of their playful novelty, but also because they’re emblematic of a creative practice that combines childlike imaginative explorations with the obsessive rendering of myriad detailed images. These sketchy drawings include weird dinosaurs and bizarre architecture, subterranean giants and an impressive negative image of a mask design that finds Anderson filling in the entire background of an Etch A Sketch screen with a succession of meticulously spaced horizontal lines.
An Etch A Sketch commercial from the 1960s claimed the toy “writes and draws like magic,” and The Fitful Portal finds Anderson playing an alchemist combining random materials in a state of free play in the service of a visionary consciousness. Abracadabra.
