Benjamin Jones at Gray Matters

What's most disturbing about Benjamin Jones's figure drawings are the arms. It's not the slightly lumpy, bald heads on the predominantly female characters. Nor is it the staring eyes or the two rows of evenly spaced square teeth that are often encased in elaborate wraparound braces. In their most extreme form, the arms begin from a single point at the shoulder and are formed by two slightly diverging lines that end in a cluster of stubby fingers. They suggest no more strength than a partially deflated balloon, and some are so short that the figures appear to be amputees. The arms are pitiful and leave the bodies, whose faces often express extreme fury, defenseless.

"Figure," this Atlanta-based artist's first exhibition in Dallas, was a concentrated presentation of 15 graphite drawings occasionally heightened with colored pencil. All the works were from 2003, and the largest was 14 by 10 inches. Looking at these figures as they glare back at you from the paper, you sense that Jones works in a state of ferocious concentration. A lightly traced line may define the head or other details, but as the drawing progresses, he usually ends up bearing down hard on the paper to get a strong black line. Most figures wear dresses with elaborate crosshatched patterns, although dense scribbling defaces a few. When he colors a drawing, as in Yellow Figure (Adult), he turns the whole image into a solid mass of color, covering skin and clothing in the same heavy yellow. This is the way a child colors, but Jones stays within the lines.

References to children's art, outsider art and art brut are inevitable when discussing Jones's work. But with a 1977 BFA and an exhibition history starting in 1985, Jones is certainly not an outsider artist. Nor does it seem right to call this work faux-naif, as though he is exploiting the look of outsider art for its "authentic" effects. He is, rather, an artist who has taken his appreciation of outsider art to create his own technically sophisticated and psychologically compelling style.

Nothing happens by chance in these drawings. What may at first seem like eccentric placement of the figures proves to be a canny use of the small scale Jones works in. His signature, in an unvarying combination of uppercase, lowercase, script and printed letters, is always a part of the composition. When Jones leaves evidence of previous compositions erased but still partially visible, they function as lost elements of the figures' personalities. In Revisiting Childhood, he has made a tiny additional head inside the head of the main figure. It suggests a doppelganger or split personality. Another figure bears a cluster of additional heads. They have lit on her face and roll down the back of her neck. Her obliviousness to them is unnerving. But it is not Jones's goal to make the viewer feel comfortable.

[Jones also had a solo exhibition of 22 drawings at Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta last spring.]

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group