Ben Schwab’s paintings are simultaneously about specific locations and about the universal experience of a place. This idea of ‘here’ and ‘there’ is a through-line in Schwab’s work - what makes a space or landscape or city familiar versus the vistas that are other. This push and pull drives a dynamism in the mark-marking and use of layering. Schwab is focusing in on the essentials - reducing down to the shapes that are the building blocks of the structures he is depicting. While geometric, there is strong sense of the hand of the artist in the paintings - they are ordered chaos.