Named after Radiohead's prophetic 1997 album, OK Computer positions BENKA's work within a lineage of cultural critique that questions the accelerating pace of digital life. Like the album, his paintings explore a world suspended between advancement and anxiety-where technology promises progress whist altering the core of human experience.
At the heart of BENKA's practice is a fascination with artificial intelligence and its creeping integration into our daily lives: from the digitisation of social interaction to the eerie familiarity of humanoid robots and omnipresent surveillance systems. His signature use of captchas- distorted combinations of letters and numbers used to distinguish humans from machines-becomes a metaphor for this shifting boundary. In BENKA's hands, they are not just security devices but symbols of resistance and fragile identity in a world increasingly governed by algorithms.
The exhibition pairs a new series of stark, black-and-white compositions with a vibrant retrospective of earlier works, revealing the evolution of an artist deeply engaged with the question of what makes us human. Influenced by the gestural freedom of 1950s informalism, BENKA works at the intersection of abstraction and code. He is painter, mathematician, and alchemist-balancing intuition and structure, chaos and control.
To approach BENKA's work is to access a new space of knowledge, to discover the alphanumeric code that opens the safe where sensibility and the search for pure art nest. OK Computer invites us into that space: one where the logic of machines meets he irreducible complexity of the human soul.
