Leonard Bullock at Kjubh

Leonard Bullock, originally from North Carolina and New York City, has lived in Europe for the last 15 years, frequently exhibiting in Switzerland and Germany. A sense of artistic breakthrough pervades Na the paintings and monoprints in his most recent solo show at Kjubh (pronounced "cube"). Bullock is a painters' painter, his direct facture influencing many better-known contemporaries such as the young Swiss artist Lori Hersberger. While Bullock often paints on surprising surfaces such as fiberglass or silk, the most arresting aspect of his work has been his mark-making, which is somewhat reminiscent of de Kooning in that it aspires to an indexical demonstration of sensation. Bullock does not copy his inspirational sources but rather updates them. He aligns a wide variety of strokes into tilted vectors, forming abstract totem poles that appear to swerve through space. His sense of touch reveals a painter more concerned with Titian and with questions of disparateness than with expressionism.

Now at midcareer, Bullock has introduced clear, linear representational images and lines of text into his newest mixed-medium pieces. The undulating typeset lines of words, in comparatively small point sizes, are poetic, even humorous, often evocative of the artist's mixed-culture life. This is also reflected in the name of the show, "Some Titles auf Englisch," wherein the artist mixes his two languages and lightly mocks the German fad for titling artworks in (often incorrect) English.

In The Donor/der Spender (2006), a painting in oil, encaustic, pencil, serigraph ink and spray paint on synthetic vellum, the images are of an ancient tree, a sapling and a young boy. These and similar delineations in the other works are derived from family snapshots taken years ago. They do not exhibit nostalgia but accentuate an artist re-embracing life and his personal history after having recently narrowly survived leukemia. The transparency of the images and linear emphasis of the text, both rendered in black, contrast with opaque crimson, white, blue-gray and golden-yellow swatches of puddled, scumbled and dabbed paint. And these in turn oppose the underlying brown, graph-paper-like grids the artist screened onto the supports. This triple play of dissimilitude emphasizes Bullock's fascination with heterogeneity in a stirring and promising new manner.

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