After winter comes autumn

Saskia Leek: Yellow is the putty of the world
Ivan Anthony
25 November - 23 December 2009

These ten recent paintings from Saskia Leek show her transition away from paler, more detailed and illustrative imagery towards a more abstract sensibility; an interest in an interlocked picture place – accompanied by a bolder, highly saturated (without being garish) warmer colouration.

She’s turning into a sort of Fauve Charles Tole, using a simplified cubist structure but without being overly concerned with radical spatial depth and perspective – more a Matisselike interest in shape and chromatic chords. With a design sensibility that varies in its flatness, Leek renders buildings, bowls of fruit, a bridge over a moonlit river, and falling autumn leaves. They often have a lyricism through arabesque shapes, especially with the bowls of fruit, where she experiments with volumetric structure, though still clinging mostly to the picture plane.

In many of these works Leek’s palette is dominated by yellow (hence the exhibition’s title) a notoriously difficult colour with which to generate a tonal richness, and not have appear garish. Obviously it alludes to sunlight, and the uplifting, buoyant mood that generates.

In this show Leek often varies her method of mounting, sometimes butting her oil painted board against a gesso painted frame, or having the painting tucked in just under the frame lip, or (most of all) float mounting it away from the frame altogether. Also, with some austere ‘experimental’ works involving stark shapes of buildings, or leaves, she sometimes paints (with thin smudges) onto the frame, extending her pale image and with its unexpectedness, generating an emotional release in its surprise. It seems spontaneous, and quite a contrast to the tighter, more carefully shaped style of most of these images. Other works are very graphic and utilize flat shapes and few colours, as if printed in a book and not painted.

Leek in her current work seems more than ever to be achieving a focused condensation through her manipulation of shape and placement of chroma. There is an articulated awareness of the board’s four edges and an attempt to achieve eloquent density of form. She is quite similar to Isobel Thom and her self portraits because of these concentrated mark/shapes, but much more interested in colour’s play on form – as opposed to that of light – and not prone to grouping separate images together on panels. Both artists make images that have an intimacy and compactness.

The best Leek works have that sense of inevitability that comes from apparently effortless composition, the feeling that only the shapes we are seeing (and their location and alignment) could ever happily describe this arrangement of objects to generate this particular mood. Remove one daub and the image (and its attendant atmosphere) disintegrates.

Essential viewing.

Sensitivities

Feelings (a group show)
Ivan Anthony
23 May - 1 July 2009

Ten Ivan Anthony artists here present sixteen works for our thoughtful deliberations - in the ‘office’ part of the gallery to the left of the top of the stairs. While some of the items have been exhibited before there is enough new work here to make this show an exciting display to spend some serious time with.

In Anthony’s office, a tiny Matt Hunt matchbox-sized painting faces two recent, considerably larger, Richard Killeen ink-jet works on the opposite wall. Killeen’s printed objects and creatures are so dense in illusory space and patterned planar surfaces that looking at them is like using a knife to cut one of those super rich Italian cakes jammed with nuts and fruit. It requires considerable ability to optically navigate around all the detail embedded in the wildlife floating before us. The air is thick with suspended fauna and intricate playthings, so much so that the composition seems holistic, without a dominant structure behind the placement of elements.

One surprise is a Roger Mortimer painting showing a plane flying low over (or within) a sea which doubles as topographical map. It is like a varnished over transfer, with a delicate, brown, brittle quality, and similar to a child’s encyclopaedia illustration with lots of unexpected detail. There are also incongruous additions – like the plane’s shadow turning into a bending hammerhead shark, or an underwater pheasant.

The title of this show is apt. It points to the visceral side effects of emotions, almost a pre-linguistic state where sensations from images and the relationships between them acquire their own power. A small Michael Harrison acrylic on paper carries the subtlest, yet most effective of punches: a delicate stalk of bamboo leaves hovering above four rocks in a pool, its downward spikey tips foils to their heavy undulating curves.

There is a sense of piercing stillness in the Harrison that mentally moves, yet the Saskia Leek in the adjacent room, of a rocklike cubist formation, is also riveting. In odd contrast to the static Harrison, Leek’s superbly constructed image seems a fragmented mound at full gallop - a sprinting tanklike animal.

Dior, the Yvonne Todd portrait, shows an immaculately tailored and impeccably made up young woman with long tousled and unruly hair. That aspect is slightly unnerving - something uncanny and disorienting - a detail that dominates the image so that (unusual for a fetish substance) its tangledness takes on an independence. It seems disembodied, with emotional properties that lash out against ‘correct’ grooming. Hair that is 'angry'.

Brendan Wilkinson’s mauve watercolour of death taunting a beautiful young woman intrigues with an inventive synthesis of fragmented skull parts, cobweb, necklace and tassels. Its drama is a cleverly placed foil to the superbly drawn Francis Upritchard dancing girl (a hand coloured lithograph) in the hallway, an image like the Harrison mentioned earlier that is calming and serene. Her languid arms and meticulous hands have an ancient Egyptian profile that offsets a peculiar but haunting impassive gaze, and implied but invisible coloured veil.