PRESENTATION: Lesley Vance-Always Circled Whirling
Lesley Vance is an abstract painter whose visual language is rooted in her early engagement with still-life painting. Seeking to move beyond the boundaries of representation, Vance departs from entirely invented and improvised forms, which she brings towards the allusion of a physical reality. Working wet-on-wet in concentrated bursts of activity, the artist follows her intuition and allows form and color to develop their own individual trajectories.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Columbus Museum of Art
Nothing is predetermined in Lesley Vance;s work. As a painting coalesces, Lesley Vance will slow her pace in response to its singular and immutable logic. The artist will often reduce the hues in a work in order to fully explore tonal range, thereby augmenting spatial depth and intensifying the clarity of her compositions. In the same vein, she will introduce intriguing surface details, such as ribbons of dark striated paint. This visual acuity results in a play with the viewer’s perception of space and depth, deconstructing a straightforward analysis of the painting’s creative genesis. Vance’s luminous watercolors investigate the same themes. Presenting Vance’s first solo exhibition in a public institution, the Columbus Museum of Art has offered up its celebrated collection of American modernist painting as a point of departure for her work. For many years, Vance has found fellow travelers in artists like Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe. With 27 paintings, a few directly inspired by works in CMA’s collection, Vance reveals the affinities between her work and theirs. The echoes of these familiar modernist works rebound in this exhibition, transformed into something new, unstable, and strangely beguiling. For Lesley Vance each painting becomes a means to discover an invented image that, in the end, has the presence of fact. Her abstractions are filled with light and shadow; complex spatial arrangements; the familiar, if ultimately mysterious, presence of physical objects (she has cited sculpture and ceramics as important influences); and most of all, the material reality of paint itself. She transforms improvised marks into pictorial bodies with discernible weight, creating images that conjure both surrealist and abstract expressionist forbears. Gestures that occur quickly, without premeditation, are patiently given the opportunity to solidify as complete ideas. This process speaks to the mind’s capacity to subsequently make sense of sudden events, as well as the ways in which memories—products of the present as much the past—are molded from moment to moment.
Photo left: Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2019, Oil on linen. Photography: Fredrik Nilsen Studio, © Lesley Vance. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Right: Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2013, oil on linen, Photography: Fredrik Nilsen Studio, © Lesley Vance. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery
Info: Columbus Museum of Art, 480 East Broad Street, Columbus, OH, USA, Duration: 21/4-3/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.columbusmuseum.org/
