Ben Sanders: Deep Time

OCHI is pleased to present Deep Time, an exhibition of new work by artist Ben Sanders. This is the Artist's third solo exhibition with the Gallery. Deep Time will be on view at OCHI, located at 3301 W Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles, California from January 14 through February 25, 2023. An Artist’s Reception will be held on Saturday, January 14th from 5 to 8 pm PST.

Ben Sanders' new paintings are striking scenes of highly-rendered earthscapes that offer visions of a post-human future. Colossal bioorganic and mineral masses form and hover over limitless seas, desert planes, cloud banks, icy-slick expanses, and perfectly peaked mountain ranges. Sanders’ subjects appear to radiate, drip, sublimate, condense, or erode, unblemished and still in deafening silence. This transformation of matter into massive sentience evolves in the absence of beauty and morality—since human consciousness represented the sole interest in measuring aesthetic perfection or determining good from evil.

Having come of age in a Southern California environment that celebrated art in service of a story, mood, or feeling, Sanders borrows from the logic of Hollywood set design while referencing analog graphic design. Sanders’ paintings create drama through form—surprising scale shifts, repeating textures ad infinitum, high-contrast color choice, and gravity-defying compositional alignments all work harmoniously towards an uncanny ambiance, a cinematic eeriness borne of an enigmatic future.

Deep Time transforms OCHI into an otherworldly landscape of lunar-sized paintings hovering over a field of black lava rock, complete with a raw steel bench designed and built by Sanders and his father. In imagining a world beyond the contemporary, Sanders’ minimalistic and optimistic paintings critique the temporality of the present as they speculate on a world beyond humanism, capitalism, dogma, and disillusionment.