Leon Benn navigates the anthropocene in solo survey at Center for Maine Contemporary Art

Leon Benn’s adventurously colored, materially inventive paintings combine technical virtuosity and art historical awareness with popular symbols in an extended reflection on the relationships between nature and culture, innocence and experience, and childhood and adulthood. Featuring a suite of new works in which chemical and alchemical processes combine, “The Violet Hour” evokes narratives of creative and destructive forces engaging in a pas de deux. Setting post-apocalyptic landscapes alongside primordial forms and wistful bouquets of flowers, Benn acknowledges our ongoing ecological catastrophe while envisioning a future in which nature displaces the harms wrought by humankind. Benn frequently begins by transferring drawings to linen or canvas by dying them in a Batik-like process. This initial step prepares the substrate as a ground for painterly experimentation in oil, oil stick, and acrylic paint in a mixture of fluid marks, loose geometric forms, and an accumulati