The Black Paintings

Beginning in 2019

The Black Paintings emerged through Moment of Silence, Knowledge Bennett’s 2019 exhibition responding to the deaths of his father, brother, and significant other the previous year. The series marked a turn toward abstraction as a space for mourning, reflection, and spiritual repair.

Constructed with black diamond dust over matte-black grounds, the paintings shift with light, distance, and the viewer’s movement. Their surfaces absorb vision, then return it through a restrained luminosity. Absence and presence coexist within a material language shaped by grief and memory.

Later works extend this inquiry through circular, square, and triangular canvases, bringing geometry, proportion, and structural logic into the paintings’ spiritual concerns. Black becomes a field of interiority, consciousness, and infinite possibility. These works invite sustained attention to what cannot be fully pictured, but can be experienced.