The Hole is pleased to present Time Traveler and Other Fragile Detours the New York solo debut of Berlin-based Chilean painter Pablo Benzo (b. 1982, Santiago), opening next Friday in our Tribeca space. The exhibition will feature five new paintings and six works on paper, inspired by works from the Peggy Guggenheim collection and her groundbreaking New York gallery Art of This Century. That 1940s venue introduced Surrealism and Cubism to a New York audience hungry for new ideas, and its experimental spirit will be echoed here in the design of the show and in the opening night celebration.

Benzo’s paintings carry that avant-garde spirit forward into the present. Working in brushy, stippled oils with a muted palette of greens and yellows, magentas and soft blues, he builds volumetric, cubist-inspired forms that shift restlessly between categories. Interiors become theatrical stages where figures, furniture, and foliage fold into one another. A favored motif is the “pancake plant,” its near-circular leaves punctuating compositions with biomorphic rhythm. In one of the show’s most compelling canvases, a woman stands in her living room gazing out the window, while beside her hangs a painting of a Modigliani-esque nude — a painting within a painting that turns the domestic space into a layered meditation on looking at and collecting art.

“I’m constantly searching for balance: between abstraction and figuration, softness and structure, silence and suggestion.”

Pablo’s personification is plump, lush and lovely, in And Then She Did What She Did the sofa odalisques with bodily bumps, belly buttons and curves and a flurry of feet underneath. In Memory Lanes a canvas on an easel oscillates between landscape of pink rolling hills and a perky pink bottom. The sumptuous roundness of the forms throughout are balanced with moments of perspective; crisp corners of canvases, window frames, foregrounds and backgrounds. With a sprinkle of logic Benzo makes the surreal start to appear possible.

This interest in nested images and “pictures within pictures” directly recalls Guggenheim’s era of radical reinvention, when artists like Picasso and Braque first destabilized perspective and invited viewers into unstable visual spaces. Benzo embraces that lineage not as mere quotation, but as what he calls a “sensory inheritance.” His compositions allow objects and figures to merge and dissolve, creating an ambiguous space where memory, imagination, and perception intermingle.

Born in Santiago, Chile, Benzo studied graphic design before turning to painting full-time. His work carries with it the memory of Chile’s intense natural light and tactile everyday textures, refracted through a distinctly European frame. Since 2013 he has lived and worked in Berlin, where the city’s density of artistic exchange and its layered modernist histories have shaped his painterly vocabulary. His paintings absorb both these geographies: the warmth of South America and the critical rigor of Berlin, fused into a practice that is intuitive, cerebral, and deeply atmospheric.

In bringing this body of work to New York, Benzo situates himself in dialogue with the radical modernist histories that Guggenheim helped foster, while also extending them into the present. The title of the exhibition Time Traveller and Other Fragile Detours, captures the sense of timelessness in Benzo’s work, as if painting from another era, past or future. “I see it not just as a historical reference, but as an emotional inheritance.” These are not nostalgic exercises but contemporary interiors, soft in color yet sharp in structure, where people, plants, and paintings coexist in mutable volumes. For his debut in New York, Benzo invites us into a world that is at once personal and historic, intimate and cosmopolitan — a reminder that the avant-garde spirit of reinvention remains alive in the city today.

“I suspect I’m painting memories I haven’t actually lived yet — scenes or feelings I somehow expect to become part of me. In that sense, the title reflects the strange elasticity of time in the emotional landscape of painting: the future echoes into the past, and the past folds into the present.”

Pablo Benzo (b. 1982 Santiago de Chile) studied Graphic Design at University of Chile. After graduating, he moved to Berlin in 2013, where he has since lived and worked. His works, known for merging surrealism and cubism, have been exhibited internationally including recent solo exhibitions at NAC Gallery, Chile; This weekend room, Seoul; Dio Horia, Shanghai; and Steve Turner, Los Angeles. His work is held in the collections of Deji Museum, Nanjing, China; Xiao Museum, Rizhao, China; X Museum, Beijing, China; Colección Casa, Santiago, Chile; Colección Solo, Madrid, Spain; and Fundación Medianoche0 / Granada, Spain.