Light plays a central role in Leon Benn’s new suite of paintings shown recently at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. The illumination is at turns eerie, wavering, blurred, artificial, ominous, and uncanny.
The title of the CMCA exhibition, The Violet Hour, infers a particular kind of luminescence, a liminal radiance that might herald the end of the world. Benn borrowed the image from T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” a good match for the ruptured yet sumptuous world found in the paintings.
Using combinations of oil paint, acrylic, and oil stick, Benn offers a wide range of imagery that prompts a host of associations. With its dripping candles, Incandescent Into the Void, 2026, brought Cocteau’s dreamlike Beauty and the Beast to mind. Candles are a traditional element of memento mori paintings. Will they light our way into the phantasmagoric great beyond in Benn’s painting? End times, it would seem, are last light times.
Leon Benn, Midnight Roomba, oil, oil stick, and fabric dye on canvas, 56 x 44 in., 2025.
The lighting in Midnight Roomba comes from a table lamp glowing in the corner of a hallucinatory interior/exterior. Among the assorted images are the robot vacuum cleaner of the title, a painting of the northern lights, and a cigarette sending up a plume of smoke from an ashtray—a free-for-all setting for dark musings.
Leon Benn, La Place à Gaz, Zone Rouge, oil, oil stick, and fabric dye on linen, 58 x 47 in., 2025.
Several paintings feature viscous topographies with openings that reveal glimpses of otherworldly realms. In La Place à Gaz, Zone Rouge, 2025, four holes appear in the fungal-invaded ground. The painting’s title—and the skull at the top—refer to an area in northeastern France ravaged by poison gas and artillery shells during World War I. Here is a radiant wasted land.
Leon Benn, Captain Future, oil, oil stick, and fabric dye on linen, 52 x 62 in., 2022.
In Captain Future, 2022, a glowing ball is half-submerged in a swamp-like setting. A man’s face appears faintly in the globe, a smiling visage from what might be a 1960s surfing movie. Is this figure some kind of savior emerging from the primordial soup?
Leon Benn, Erupting Chemical Reaction No. 1, oil, oil stick, and acrylic paint on linen, 44 x 29 in., 2025.
In more than one manner of speaking, Benn lays it on thick. He builds layers of paint over a substrate of dyed cloth, both linen and canvas, to create these beautifully grotesque paintings. The fiery flare-up in Erupting Chemical Reaction No. 1, 2023, brought to mind Meg Weston’s volcano poems, including the final lines of “Highway 137: The Red Road”: “The charcoal-fires of the earth / an inexorable march to the sea / sculpting a new landscape / and forever closing that road.”
These works represent a shift in Benn’s vision. The work in his 2020 show, Garden Techniques, also glowed with ample color, yet the featured flora reflected what seemed like an optimistic take on the artist’s surroundings in Portland, Maine, in the throes of the pandemic. This time around, Benn has gone all in on representing an alarming and strangely alluring Anthropocene.
Full view of the image at top: Leon Benn, Incandescent Into the Void, oil, oil stick, and fabric dye on linen, 36 x 31 in., 2026.