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Saskia Leek at Jonathan Smart
Art in America, Jan, 2007 by Roger Boyce
Saskia Leek's 13 recent paintings--each about 9 by 12 1/2 inches--in plain, white, wooden frames ran single file across the walls of Jonathan Smart's second-floor gallery. Leek depicts landscapes, sometimes with built structures (cottages, a bridge, an oil rig). In rare instances, her typically depopulated scenes include a human figure (the painting Dell is visually anchored by a woodenly pictographic bagpiper in a kilt) or a beast (Poet features an albino horse galloping in the foreground of a paint-by-number-like depiction of a desert promontory).
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If Charles Burchfield had shifted his practice from northeast America to the antipodes, he might have made something similar to the light-bleached and eccentrically inspirited oil paintings of Leek. For instance, both Leek and Burchfield employ recurring enigmatic motifs (reverberant suns, graphically rendered, and portentous cast shadows) as both literal/descriptive and allusive/symbolist devices to set up a question-raising pictorial dualism.
While working similar cryptic territory, the artists' temperaments could not differ more. Burchfield ardently apotheosized the natural world in a sort of quasi-religious, animistic manner. Conversely, Leek's pictures--although suggesting that more is there than meets the eye--maintain a cool, wry and decidedly secular posture.
The childlike symbolist sun hanging over Leek's Mountain House (a snow-clad cabin in a copse of leafless trees) and the gelid orb beaming down on Blue Tomb (a glacial lake set like a rough--cut gem in a subalpine valley) suggest reserves of preternatural potential--as in Burchfield's studies of place. But Leek keeps her paintings' emotional temperature down, and the viewer at arm's length. She approaches the deft balancing act between loaded symbolist content and cool execution by shuffling and reshuffling tonally close, high-key values and puckishly nuanced tints.
A contemporary corollary to Leek's practice can be found in the work of Maureen Gallace. Leek and Gallace paint intimately scaled scenes in an offhand manner, yet both arrive at accomplished results. However, while Gallace uses subtly virtuosic paint handling to model otherwise mundane landscapes, virtuoso painting turns are nowhere to be found in the paintings of Saskia Leek. Her efforts exhibit a marked disregard of dexterous surface incident in favor of practiced nonchalance. Leek pretends to employ paint as nothing more than a means to an end. However her tissue-thin, gouachelike oils assuredly emit hushed spectral light and dazzle demurely.
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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
