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An exploration into the darkness

What Ben Blanchard paints is shaded and nuanced by night. Groop Gallery is thrusting it into the light of day. Blanchard holds the brush behind the latest exhibition at the private gallery downtown on Third Avenue and George Street.

What Ben Blanchard paints is shaded and nuanced by night. Groop Gallery is thrusting it into the light of day.

Blanchard holds the brush behind the latest exhibition at the private gallery downtown on Third Avenue and George Street. It opened Thursday night and it is entitled Phantasmagoria. It is what Groop proprietor Melanie Desjardines called his "foray into fable, fiction and fantasy through visual images."

The exhibition, as the name suggests, is rooted in whimsical but slightly dramatic themes. The word is wrapped in the cold, slimy fingers of macabre dreams and terrifying scenes of the preternatural come to visit in the flesh. It's also a video game. And a poem by Lewis Carroll and a 19th century form of theatre that tickled people's horror-bone in central Europe. Now, it walks out of the shadows of Blanchard's home art studio, from whence once only a few ghostly images had emerged before. A few of his paintings had been accepted by Desjardines to hang for sale amongst the chorus of artists she features at Groop Gallery.

"I was talking to Melanie about doing a whole exhibition, just jokingly saying 'when's it going to be my turn for a show' but eventually the conversation became more focused on yeah, when are we going to schedule something? We talked like that for more than a year, mostly because it caught me a little off guard that she would actually consider it. She asked me a couple of times if I was ready, and only recently did I start to actually calculate wall space and what I had for work I could hang there."

At first he was unsure he had enough material. His paintings - oil on canvas, mostly, but he's painted these images on everything from bottles to clothing - are small squares. Of the 24 he has on display in Phantasmagoria, 10 of them are no bigger than 14 inches square. A few of the biggest are two feet by four feet - a normal size in the classic art world but a mere postage stamp compared to many modern works.

"I've been painting as much as possible the last couple of months," said the 25-year-old Blanchard. "It felt like 'oh man, I have this show, so Id better get at it' and I was doing some experimenting at the same time. I didn't create any specifically in mind of the show, but I did want to have more options to go along with the older ones already done."

He also painted over a few old ones and started from scratch, did a major modification to another, and completed some long stalled works in progress. Having the show as a deadline spiced up the motivation he already had, and has since childhood when he first discovered his penchant for converting the images in his imagination into tangible scenes available to the world.

Although the show has the overtures of the sinister and creepy, it is truer to describe the works as Gothic glimpses into our own local realities. Yes, he dips his brush mostly into the darker, monochromatic wells on the colour palette, but he is evidently interested more in those tones and shades than scaring anyone.

"There is a lot of night in my work. Because I prefer the night more than the day. That's when I become more mentally active. My images are mostly fantasy. Lately almost solely I've been painting owls and trees, although I actually hate painting trees. They are really challenging for me and at the same time they are one of my main backdrops. I haven't figured out why I focus on owls but I do enjoy the research and working at mastering the structure of the owl. That has kept my interest."

The objects of his interest are framed and collected at Groop Gallery until Aug. 9.