Ben Jones: The New Dark Age

On September 18, 2008, Ben Jones and Andreas Melas Presents will launch “Celebrate the New Dark Age” in Athens, Greece. “Celebrate the New Dark Age” is a sweeping painting, sculpture and video exploration of the search for spiritually edifying Platonic forms and ideas in a time of social tumult. Using discreet units of images and shapes, Jones has constructed a visual language that invites both participation and celebration. This language accumulates into sets of ideal formal bodies and geometries in an exuberant modernist language of color and line. In this, Jones recalls both mid-century hard edged abstraction and more contemporary figurative activities. His paintings offer a window into his oblique narratives — mysterious scenes of the literal ups and downs of daily life along with the totems we construct to help us abide. His sculptures give physical form to the totems on display in his paintings, giving physical heft to the ideas on display, as figures and forms emerge from walls, floors, and ceilings. The cinematic projections on view in the basement of AMP then make these images and figures move, giving them explicit content. The cumulative effect is a journey into a contextual place both specific to Jones and, in its social and spiritual concerns, accessible to all.