Zachary Dean Jones: A Midsummer Night/The Gods Must be Crazy

Painting by Zachary Dean Jones. Courtesy of the artist.

By DAVID JAGER September 2, 2024

Zachary Dean Jones, an abstract painter hailing from Ohio, held a festive and celebratory showing of his paintings at the historic Zenner house in Athens OH during a recent weekend in August. Replete with references that support his abstraction, Jones situates his work with a number of referential and allegorical markers. Beyond the formal aspects of his painting, Jones engages materials, locale, history and several literary and mythological themes in his work. The approach is ambitious and heady.

Jones himself has stated that his abstraction maintains its allegiance to place through his use of local minerals mixed into his pigments, a practice he traces back to Anselm Kiefer and Andy Goldsworthy. The use of natural elements affixed to canvases is indeed something Keifer is known to do, while Goldsworthy is more specifically known for his ephemeral on-site installations that he then photographs and leaves to nature.

All this to say that the local minerals of Ohio are infused in each canvas, which accounts for their iridescent quality and hue. This is combined with a palette allegedly inspired by the palette of 15^th century art, though which artist is not specified. It explains the title “A Midsummer Night’s Evening/The Gods Must Be Crazy”, which harkens back to the Elizabethan, as evidenced by the period costumes Jones and assembled company wore. 

There are mythological elements as well. Many of Jones canvases are marked by a middle divide or horizon line. In some of the works such as in “Chaos in Olympus” or “Heavenly Rebirth”, the dividing line is marked in gold or paint dried and textured like ceramic dunting or cracked desert mud. The line is metaphysical, as reflected in the title, there is a heaven and earth divide that is being referenced.

The Divine Realm. Courtesy of the artist.

The viewer, in other words, is immediately oriented rather than left challenged with a purely abstract painterly surface. These paintings, are, in a sense, landscapes, where figuration is contextually implied. It places these paintings squarely in the camp of lyrical or semi figurative abstraction, as wild and unbridled as the compositions may be. The link to Keifer is again palpable, as Kiefer also engages in a similar type of metaphysical/allegorical abstraction employing symbolic attribution and literal elements.

Metaphysics and literature are another strong reference point, placing another layer of attribution or meaning. The painting titled “Angels, Gods and Demons” in fact seems to be colored according to an otherworldly schema. Its red drips spattered against a back drop of lemon yellow and gold could be the demons, while pure veins of gold floating over washes of whitish blue might be angels. Overall the surface is layered and reworked with dense energy, a blurred vision that appears partly celestial in intent.

The same colorized allegory is seen in ‘Dantes Inferno’, where the cerulean sky, smudged with impasto smears of white that could be angels, but turns into a rain of bloody streaks on the canvases lower half. The usual dividing line is present once again as a wash of faintly cracked white. Once again one has the sense of witnessing not a pure abstract study in figure or ground but rather a depiction of heaven and hell writ large.

Painting by Zachary Dean Jones. Courtesy of the artist.

The same palette is used for a different purpose in ‘Genesis in clay’ a collection of gestating and rhythmically patterned red forms against a yellow gold background. Here the red takes on a generative or chthonic aspect, creation rather than destruction. Two white and ghostly blobs occupy the northern and southern hemispheres of the canvas, and their presence is mysterious. One is always tempted, in other words, to attempt a symbolic analysis.

“Devils in Modern Skies” takes the established color elements of the other paintings and bleeds them together. The gold streaks upwards and becomes infused with blues and rose pinks while a gritty volcanic soot appears to be dripping down the canvas from top to bottom. It’s the work that is closest to a genuine abstract piece given that its constituent elements appear to float rather than be separated in any fashion, there is a horizontal push from left to right, like the curtain of an approaching thunderstorm.

The most pleasing and unified painting of the show is possibly ‘The Divine Realm’, a field of blue and white with a signature white stripe across the canvases rectangular middle. Here the often busy layers of meaning or attribution are subsumed into a purely painterly field of balance and serenity. If this is Jones’s vision of heaven, it’s not a bad one. WM