Lesley Vance. Paintings, On Paper

About

Lets shake a bit as we slide and blur across the floor. Lets be inchoate and atmospheric. That’s how Lesley Vance is doing it in these new watercolors in which color justifies itself and a kind of automatic drawing evolves stroke into shape and then the increasingly delicate description of space. The artist explores her own miasmic looseness. Sitting flat on top of (rather than absorbed into) smooth, vellum-like surfaces, the liquefied pigment looks still-watery and alive seeming. Brushwork is aleatory and intuitive, meandering line-work somewhat reminiscent of late de Kooning or Brice Marden with his inked stick. Contrapuntally, the flow of watercolor is sliced with the scissored sharpness of collage, cut and arranged with an equally nimble sensitivity. She’s been thinking a lot about Krasner’s collaged paintings, full of internal disjunction, distance, and great graphic power. These paintings embody alertness, a responsiveness to those fragile gifts of chance that can happen on the drawing table, or off, if you’re paying close attention. She is in thrall to that magic moment when form and a new kind of visual sense first take hold, emergent out of static webs and fields of color. The sudden birth, the surprise invention of shapes has a lot to do with the feeling and pleasure in these works; they tap the surging energy of her oil paintings in their early, private stages. Form often appears through subtractive wiping away and erasure. Vance’s pictures want to be several things at once: they want to bleed, spill, streak, and be messed up whenever they want and also be taut, tight, precise, and slanted on point. Her planes—painted and collaged—interlock in weird ways and cast spells of momentary optical confusion that merge and reorder layers. They say, lets slip and slide. Lets play fast and loose.