‘Deep Time’ is an exhibition of paintings by the London based artist Ben Jamie.
Ben Jamie’s paintings travel the grand arc of history to reach deep into the foundations of the earth and its cultures. His landscapes are raw organic places, scenes of a world in the process of formation. Rock and river move with leviathan intent, oozing with the energy of creation. A golden light saturated with mineral dust hangs across every view. In the midst of these formations, characters appear like titans emerging from the stuff of the earth: a colossus dripping with time from his hoary beard; a fallen hero lying in a lake in a forest glade. These are narrative archetypes from the depths of storytelling, as much part of the process of creation as the land. In his paintings Ben Jamie traces a connection between the ages of the earth and the ancient beginnings of shared culture, depicting them as distinct strands of one vast interconnected web, a greater entity both concrete and conscious.
‘Deep Time’ features a number of Ben’s most recent ‘tree’ paintings that consider the forest as a giant life form, something far older, more productive and more expansive than humanity. These paintings describe trees as abstract visual webs of writhing trunks and branches, where hard-to-discern patterns suggest journeys and pathways that are too complex to map. In these works, trees become their own landscapes, spreading and sprawling with creative energy.
The physical nature of paint is just as important as what is being described. Ben’s works emerge from layers of impasto built up and worked back like geological strata. This lends the paintings considerable weight and substance. Graphic hard-edge marks echo the rocks and branches they describe; colour patches float and combine like camouflage, partly hiding, partly revealing their subject. Reading the mark making becomes a matter of delving into layers of paint that are packed tight like muscle, to be pried apart in order to reveal the hidden histories within. It is lush, physical, meaty painting, appropriate to its subject.
