LESLEY VANCE: PAINTINGS, WATERCOLORS
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Paintings, Watercolors, an exhibition of new work by Lesley Vance.
January 11 - February 23, 2025
Vance’s newest works find her entering into an ever more profound engagement with multiple legacies of painting. The exhibition features large- and medium-scale canvases, including several in formats that are new for the artist, along with a group of new watercolors. In addition to her perennial interests in color and visual movement, Vance experiments here with greater contrast between areas defined by expressive brushwork and those defined by uniform fields of color. The brushwork exudes a particularly active life of its own, providing clues to the unruly, emotionally fertile place from which the paintings begin.
As she endeavors to familiarize herself with the unknown or unpredictable facets of each painting, Vance also leaves room for processes that move her in the opposite direction, from the known back toward the unknown. A large-scale painting in a vertical format has been constructed from a sunny if acidic collection of blues, yellows, whites, and blacks. Viewed from afar, it points to Vance’s long-standing interest in the pop-inflected Surrealism and serious-minded humor of the Chicago Imagists. Drop shadows that demarcate the edges of some of the curvilinear forms connote a traditional sense of three-dimensional space, but closer inspection initiates a gradual visual unraveling.
Frayed, feathered, ribbon-like patches of yellow, black, and white threaten to dispel the notion that there is any distinction between foreground and background. Instead, Vance fully immerses herself in the calligraphic, elegant, impulsive, and exploratory potential of flatness and the sheer facts of oil paint on linen. These passages feel unadorned and honest, even when they hint at illusionistic effects and conjure the experience of light moving through liquid, for example, or the striations of materials as varied as hair and rock.
A watercolor featuring swaths of amber and blue is also dominated by unfurling waves of black, white, and grey that alternately embrace and overcome everything else around them. Inasmuch as those waves appear to have a will of their own, their status as living things—perhaps even living beings—exemplifies how Vance’s abstraction always tends toward the real. Her pictures do things that other things in the known world do, even when they cannot be assigned to any particular category of animate or inanimate form, and even when they are clearly nothing more and nothing less than paintings.