Ben Durham, Amanda (text), 2019. Graphite text on handmade paper, 37×28″
“Amanda is nearly a total blank to me now,” writes artist Ben Durham. “Just a distant memory of a snarling lip.” Words take on a cellular quality in his Text Portraits, photo-realistic figures formed by language, memory, and impossibility. For 18 years, Durham has been studying friends and former classmates from his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, sourcing their mugshots from an online database and producing large-scale works composed entirely of his written recollections of their lives. His graphite-on-paper drawings immaculately depict the visual, but the strain of each sentence suggests something inscrutable.