The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Looking at Saskia Leek’s works is like standing on the threshold of understanding, or straining to see through an opaque glass window. She isolates cameos of the world, setting them aside for inspection, for deliberation and observation. Her paintings explore a territory of the familiar and the strange: horses that gallop from nowhere; paths that lead uncertainly to houses that look repressed, locked and shuttered; an oil rig under a dying sunset.
Like soap-opera episodes of Coronation Street crafted from stock characters, sets and props, Leek’s exhibitions embark on the novelisation and serialisation of everyday life. The prima facie subject matter of individual works is often recurring: horses, houses, flowers, sunsets—the stock-in-trade of Sunday painters everywhere. Her work draws together this prosaic raw material and infuses it with an altogether different intensity and tone. Leek’s painting process transforms things of humble origin into talismans of value and sentiment where everything matters.
It is as if each exhibition were a novella, picking up a set of extended metaphors, and producing a motive, an impulse, a thought, a heightened emotional tone, that resonates through that exhibition. ‘Thick Air Method’ was Leek’s latest show, opening in May at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco. ‘Thick Air’ perfectly describes the heavy, airless intensity that tends to prevail in Leek’s concise, roughly A4 paintings. Relentlessly small and uniform in format, the works draw you into their world of doubtful perspective and dense fauvist shadows.
The literary connotations of the novella are not coincidental. Since her earliest exhibitions Leek’s works have been positioned alongside poetry and fiction, in almost hand-in-glove collaborations with writers and other artists. There is a certain delicacy in this approach in not revealing... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline