Ben Sanders envisions paintings and completes drawings while sitting in church. It sounds as though the pictures yielded by this arrangement would be moralistic, maudlin or mocking; but instead, he transfigures personal and religious narratives into open-ended metaphors for the human condition. Sanders is a commercial illustrator with a penchant for collecting secondhand Teleflora vases. The influence of these practices is evident in his quirky, vibrant pictures that flirt with tackiness without going overboard. His current show at Ochi Projects, titled “I Come to the Garden Alone,” features bold paintings downstairs and quietly emotive drawings upstairs. Surrogate self-portraits reflect Sanders’ own anxieties under the lens of spiritual themes and current events. A recurring protagonist is a personified vase embodying a certain sympathetic cartoonishness. This character’s accessories, contents and surroundings offer clues to each picture’s larger significance. Suggesting police brutality, The Weight (2017) stars a vessel as a disguised protestor shackled to a blue baton. Symbolizing the artist’s fear of self-isolation, The Know-It-All (2016-2017) features a vase marooned in a desert of cracked earth. In other works, Sanders introspectively ruminates on the peculiar irrationality of religious faith. Mammon (2016) and The Seraph (2017, pictured above), for instance, assume whimsically improbable morphologies engendered by lack of empirical knowledge. Contrasting with such incorporeal notions, Sanders edges his painted panels in outré veneers of Himalayan pink salt, swimming pool noodles and industrial diamond plate that anchor his paintings in the material world as flamboyant totems to insecurity.

Ochi Projects
3301 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90018
Show runs through Apr.14