Ben Aronson, Southern California Coast, 2019, oil on panel, 72 x 60 in.

LewAllen Galleries’ second solo exhibition of Ben Aronson’s paintings includes cityscapes that demonstrate the artist’s remarkable capacity to convey, in masterful combinations of impressionistic atmosphere, color, and light, the sensory experience of a captured moment in the life of a city.

Aronson’s signature synthesis of realism and abstraction expressively translates the everyday reality of metropolitan forms and life, rooftops, skyscrapers, streets, stop signs, and sidewalks, into resplendent tableaux of urban geometry and motion, light, and shadow that uniquely compress the spirit of a place. In the group of paintings that comprises “Views from Above,” Aronson conveys his scenes from the rooftops, an aspect of the urban environment typically hidden from view. These works attest to Aronson’s resolute view that, even at its most quotidian, the city is “the wellspring of visual ideas … everything in the world is there, concentrated, and comes at you like a great rushing visual tsunami.”