Paintings (Art) must contain humility, devotion, and honesty, while providing a space for potential.
- Behle 2022
My art and practice come out of a pursuit to create and employ a language of visual poetics in which to examine relationships. This language relies on strategies of fiction, mimicry, the recontextualizing of subject matter, formalism, and a tactile engagement with material. I feel that in our visually saturated world, images can stall, it is as if they carry too much history, meaning, and/or information, and are canceled out by their overabundance. So, through the use of formal devices, appropriation, and a (re)ordering of these elements, I search for a language that can impact and speak with a new coherency.
Painting is an accurate place to locate a description of my work in its physical sense. In regards to the content of my work, a more pluralistic concern exists. This pluralism is made up of ideas in exploring spaces that are at once familiar and not, images that prompt a recollection then redirect to ambiguity, the physical and nonmaterial are all areas of interest for me. A conversation between the digitally conjured and the direct authenticity of painted marks often exists in the works. I find these dualities are analogous to how life works and serve as useful structures for exploration.
- Behle, 2019
“Artists like Michael Behle look inward, employing a poetic, subtle abstraction, and combining materials and textures, from digital prints to oil and acrylic.”
- Hannah Klemm Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Saint Louis Art Museum (New American Painting juror, issue #155), 2021
Michael Behle’s images wish they could talk to each other, even sleep together. The reality of painting, here, lies in its inner failure. The polyphony of media makes us think that the purpose precisely is in the misunderstanding. The digital image finally sleeps with the painting, and the sense of grotesque and poetry eventually resolves the enigma.
- Hélène Baril, artist/writer, 2019 (Temporary Art Review)
It becomes easier every day to make an image, even an image that by the standards of past generations would be considered sophisticated. I can do this on my laptop using Photo Booth; so can my five-year-old. Mike Behle uses images like these—uncannily mirrored photographs of a cluttered desktop or a still life, impossibly fractured surfaces of punched tin, all of them so simple to produce they’ve become banal, even though they’re not really. Behle truly uses them, both in the sense of deployment and exploitation. He makes them the random ground on which to produce simple paintings, each in a single straight-from-the-tube paint color that pops right off its dull backdrop. What does he paint? That remains to be seen. Some shapes register in a fuzzy way: maybe a figure with its arms out here, maybe a bunch of droopy flowers there. The sheer pleasure generated by looking at these pictures doesn’t quite add up from their parts. But then, Behle isn’t a mathematician, he’s an artist.
- Lori Waxman, Chicago Tribune Art Critic, 2015
Laumeier Project and related thoughts:
I’m very interested in the human experience—it offers up a tremendous field in which the unending cultivation of ideas can be explored. More specifically, my work has focused in a large part on the idea of a cycle and the give and take of information, a kind of communicative exchange. This may be found in the form of individuals conversing, a group ingesting information provided on a mass scale by their establishment, or something more isolated, and intimate, such as the struggles an individual might endure within themself. I see these situations as two parts—a kind of cause and effect. Often times the contrast is staggering. The impact we have on one another and our surroundings, these exchanges of actions, words, and effects are everything. How is it we might operate in a most poignant and affirmative manner yet simultaneously create a deficit from which the lot is touched in the most negative way? How are ideas and actions exchanged, understood and mistaken, and what does that look like? I watch. I wonder. I invest emotionally and intellectually and complete the process as some sort of critic/maker of self and environment—a contributor of visuals, objects, and experiences. The purpose is in the misunderstanding. I believe that in the understood lies stagnation, and in order to continue in a progressive manner we must challenge ourselves with what might not be understood. For the Kranzberg Series at Laumeier Sculpture Park, I have decided to create an installation piece. I have employed sound in the sculpture/installation Disintegration; it is the logical solution for the concept in the piece. The speakers provide the conduit between the subject (artist) and his/her audience. The collection and layering of feedback eventually become a bother of undecipherable noise. In response, the subject purges forth a mass of color and beauty. This in itself will also break down and become a vapid ghost—a sort of lament on the permanence of external forces and their vitality as we the individuals fade. It is a cycle of our cancellation.
- Behle, 2009
The first room seen on entering the gallery features Michael Behle, with his large flower and speakers audio/visual installation titled Disintegration and a small painting (Your gentleness towards me) across from it.I like Michael Behle. I think his paintings are great, and am glad we in Chicago are fortunate to have access to them at the Peter Miller Gallery. I thought his sculpture was awful. The construction and execution was just too weak to support an idea – the artist’s function of absorbing nonsense from his audience and vomiting beauty in response – that isn’t interesting or convincing. The painting Behle chose to hang was much more interesting, but it would have looked better alone.
- Steve Ruiz, Chicago Art Review, Built, Kranzberg exhibition at Laumeier Sculpture Park, 2009
Michael Behle's canvases at the Peter Miller Gallery look to me like a 21st Century version of that late-20th Century goal known as "Bad Painting."
For those who don't recall, "Bad Painting" was a kind of figurative work that embraced everything loud, kitschy and apparently inept, proposing through the process of inversion that it could be a new standard of beauty. The ideal, as one practitioner from Chicago put it, was to be so engaged in expressionistic thrashing that even the creator could not tell the difference between good and bad.
Behle's contemporary twist involves a postmodern pileup: abstract passages thrown against representation, flatly drawn linear structures set atop figurative forms painted in the round, rainbows of color contrasted with the starkness of black and white. This is done in such ways as to produce a shagginess that looks that much the worse -- sorry, better -- for being violently invasive (color extruded from a mouth to be forced into an ear) or confining (a head surrounded by innumerable cages).
Whether the artist is in control of this or cannot help himself was once beside the point. But the art world today prizes hyperconsciousness whereas at the height of "Bad Painting" it celebrated obliviousness. So we may assume that Behle, in his paintings as well as a lone wood-and-rope sculpture, is fully in command, irritating so effectively that it becomes balm to the hippest of his viewers.
- Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune Art Critic, 2007
Paintings 2008 - 2012:
I see the deformed/grotesque quality in the paintings as a point of reference. As in traditional portraiture, there is a figure captured for our contemplation. Information is offered, but in these works, the information gets mixed and convoluted. We gain a sort of assurance in thinking that there is that grotesque out there and we are not a part of it (a sort of better him than me attitude). But, upon further contemplation on the subject, the question arises, “What, if anything, sets us apart?” How quickly could we become that form of disparity?
The other day on a talk show I learned that almost seventy percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck—a moment away from being homeless, grotesque in some minds. It could be in the form of bad information, missed information, or unfortunate inventions that can potentially begin to change others’ perceptions. The paintings (MikeLaura, April 29th and December 19th, 1972) are combined of different individuals, different information is brought by each image and each subject represents something particular to those who know them. They have a certain origin that they share, a connecting point, like birth date, a city in which they are from, or, in the case of MikeLaura, a union recognized by our society as marriage. So in this sense, there is a connection to them all. However, once they begin to combine they speak of something very different than similarities.
Now we are given an unexpected, maybe difficult image to ponder. In the paintings April 29th and December 19th, 1972 there is a nod to celebrity and pop culture and the injection of it into the average… I selected certain individuals to comment on the Americana-ness of it all—football players, and actors from sitcoms of the ’70s. It is a vast spectrum, but it’s us, and these images might speak to what we look like more than we wish to accept.
- Behle, 2006
“Thus the breakdown of a previously established order provides the armature for rearranging its components, and from that process, the shape of a provisional new order emerges.”
- Robert Storr, from the essay Disparities and Deformations our Grotesque 2004
Portrait Drawings:
The graphite/inkjet portion of the drawings presents a type of realism, yet it’s a generic realism as all are rendered in the same fashion. There are expressions that differ but come from that same black and white place. The images in gouache/acrylic speak of a detachment from that reality. The iconography of pink elephants, animated bullets, eyes, and flowers, etc… are like pictures from the mind. They function as thoughts we may entertain in our conscious state, alone or with others, and possibly as a fantastical inventory of images taken from the subconscious mind that we dare not entertain.
I like to think about the drawings as explorations of portraiture in the physical as well as the psychological sense. That is, in terms of the physical, the drawings take a direction from the sitter from issues of clothing, skin tone, hairstyle, and facial features. Then in the psychological aspect, there is a type of emotion suggested through the sitter’s expression. This expression, though static, is often the result of the imagery to which they are juxtaposed. This opens the possibility to explore questions about how we react to situations. What do we really think about the issues in our lives, the issues in the world? Why might we guard those truths, and what does that look like?
- Behle, 2004