photography by Derek Henderson and Steven Stinson.

For better or worse, we tend to evaluate nature almost exclusively in terms of human values.

Transporting our minds into, say, the point of view of a bee or a butterfly, is almost unthinkable. What colors or patterns might an orchid seduce a butterfly with? What relationships might play out in their ecosystem? Sydney-based painter Benedict dos Remedios' latest exhibition, "Friends with Benefits", explores this subjectivity by placing audiences in the cockpit of a butterfly's consciousness.

Using acrylic and gouache, Benedict’s canvases visualize the evolution of the butterfly and the orchid, showing how they've grown together to survive. “I am always trying to connect the beauty of nature back to ourselves,” he tells me, “the story of how the orchids and butterflies copy each other is fascinating.” It also resembles a human story: while preparing for his previous exhibit, "Catfished", Benedict flirted with the idea that we too might use our colorful eyespots to trick predators and attract others. "The idea behind the orchid is that it doesn't really have nectar to give to the pollinators to make anything out of it. They rub their pollen on a butterfly and the butterfly goes to another flower to pollinate it. The insects aren't getting any love from this ritual, which made me think they were getting catfished, same with the name for ‘Friends with Benefits’."

The paintings dazzle with details of variegated patterns on the wings of Lepidoptera. In “Leopard Butterfly #1”, the lightly airbrushed spots of midnight blue look as if they had been frayed at the edges — burned by the glowing auburn of the wing and transformed to a light cerulean. Part of Benedict’s practice includes researching images of orchids and butterflies on the Instagram explore page before sketching them. “The colors aren’t true to what’s in the pictures,” he said, “I want to combine all these natural elements to evoke a different reaction.” He paused, smiling, “Of course, what colors insects see is probably very different from what we see.”

This abiding curioisty in nature extends back to Benedict's adolescence, when he would wander the labs at Sydney University where his father worked as a professor of anatomy. "He'd stick his business card in our pockets and tell us not to get into any trouble, but if you do, he’d say, tell them who you are." At the end of summer holidays, his father would pay him to trudge through the bush to collect cicadas. "He was doing some sort of study on the muscles of the back legs and how they make noise. As kids, we would find the shells and if you had good enough eyes, you’d be able to find living ones and put them in a shoebox."

Benedict is soft-spoken, calm, attentive to his surroundings — the hallmark qualities of someone who has spent a life immersed in nature. I was surprised to learn he had spent ten years living and working in New York City, moving to the city in 2009 right as the GFC struck Australia. "People asked me why I was moving here when everyone's leaving. I was a photo assistant and my wife was working as a stylist. People told us there was no work here. Yet I fell in love with the city and got stuck here for ten years." As an outsider immersed in an unfamiliar metropolis, he let the city's romantic past influence him. The story of abstract expressionism struck a nerve with him — the story of Rothko and Pollock struggling in post-war America, refusing to look to Europe for everything and starting their own movement. "I remember reading de Kooning's biography when I first moved here and loving how incredibly localized it was. He lived in the East Village, in TriBeca, went to all the bars, went to the Hamptons. When you live in New York, these are part of your traveling paths, those areas haven't changed. His studio is still in the Springs, near Pollock's."

When I googled Benedict’s paintings, I came across the titles “MARIPOSA 5” and “101 Dalmatians Diptych”, references to the Mariposa butterfly and the Dalmatian orchid. The more I clicked through these visualizations of diverse species, the less “real” they became. de Kooning fused abstraction and figuration to make the bodies of women blend with the landscape, “the landscape is in the Woman and there is Woman in the landscape”, he once quipped. Benedict has likewise flourished in this fusion of abstraction and realism, of capturing the abstract within the real. “We do that all the time in nature,” he tells me, “we take a birds-eye view of a riverway and recognize it as an abstract painting. It’s why Australian Indigenous art is so incredible — they understood the land so well.” I mentioned to Benedict how dumb I feel whenever I recall that color is just another form of abstraction, the product of our brain’s hardwiring. “That’s like everything, isn’t it?” he laughed, “We think everything’s how we see it. I’ve sold artworks to people and they’ve hung them upside down. Everyone sees what they want to see.”

In 2014, while living in New York, he began a series of paintings titled “Big Waves”. He had taken old images of Japanese tsunamis and painted over the top with layers of watercolor and gouache. “I remembered hearing the story of Chaos Theory, how the flap of a butterfly wing in the Caribbean could cause a tsunami on the other side of the world.” The interest came from his time growing up surfing in Sydney. Lying horizontally on a plank of polyurethane foam, paddling towards heaving walls of ocean, provided him with a lasting respect for nature. “Some people are so connected to nature they aren’t scared. I wanted to recreate that sensation by painting large waves, to make audiences feel incredibly small in the midst of nature.” 

A couple years ago, Colin Tunstall, the co-founder of Saturday’s NYC, a New York-based clothing and lifestyle brand, got talking to Benedict about using his orchids as a yardage print for the brand. “I was a little bit concerned with the quality of the print due to how difficult it is to replicate the painting's soft airbrush feel. But they did an incredible job with the quality of the shirts and shorts.” Saturday’s NYC turns fifteen this fall, where Benedict’s “Friends with Benefits” can be seen in their studio space on Crosby Street.

As we were finishing our chat, he mentioned the origin and meaning of his surname. “dos Remedios was Portuguese originally, but the family ended up moving to Spain.” Benedict’s father was born in Japan, and his grandfather was half Japanese, half Spanish. “In Spanish,” he said, “the name doesn’t really translate properly, it sounds like it means two remedies. ‘dos Remedios’ is a Portuguese name. It means that someone in our family was a doctor or some sort of healer once upon a time.”

I wondered if Benedict was carrying his family’s legacy in some capacity, if the give and take of the orchid-butterfly motif might be healing, bringing the reciprocity and beauty of nature back into the realm of the human. In “MARIPOSA 5”, a series of white shapes look like teeth arranged against the blood-orange fabric of the wing. That level of individuation in a single organism — and the attentiveness required to paint nature’s patterns, forms and colors — is healing. We might even recognize how significant our role is to keep this sacred ecosystem alive.