"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.
The stories these paintings suggest are awesome in every sense of the word. The Violet Hour conjures ruinous landscapes, nuclear tests, landfills, even microplastics, but channels them through the fantastic imaginings of childhood, suggesting—as does T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, from which it takes its title—that all is not lost where imagination persists."
