LESLIE SMITH III: AS I REMEMBERED

February 21 - March 21, 2014

Maus Contemporary is excited to announce Leslie Smith III: As I Remembered, the artist’s first one-person exhibition with the gallery.

An abstract painter, Smith explores both the complexity of the non-representational and the expansiveness created by working on non-traditional supports. Not content with being confined by the linearity of the rectangle or the square, Smith explodes the confines of geometry with custom designed shaped canvas supports that would seem accidental were they not so absolutely intentional, their soft edges falling away, drifting, challenging viewers’ expectations and creating tensions that are almost unimaginable.

Smith uses this tactic in works of varying scales. Night Twitch and Night Baptism seem like an inverted mirrored pair, each set in tension with the other, their surfaces arrayed with the gestures of Smith’s markmaking, their curved edges rolling away from and under the other. Although black at first glance, they are in fact studies in tone and texture, filled with chiaroscuro, subtle plays of both stillness and motion. Smith’s painting Night Mass (image shown), an intimate 27 x 27 inch work, continues this exploration, its surface filled with subtle geometric shapes that emerge at the top and the hint of a horizon line lower. This oscillation between abstraction and the use of concrete forms creates and even more discernable tension within each work.

Smith’s understandings of pictorial space in abstraction come roaring forward in another new work, Night at the Orchestra (scroll down for image), which takes the depths of Night Mass and adds a spatial geometry, pushing forward and into the viewers’ space.

Copy Cat, a new 48 x 48 inch painting (scroll down for image), literally feels as if it could leap off the wall. Its forms seem as if they could reflect, veil and reveal at precisely the same moment as Smith pushes viewers away, holds them close and pulls them through in the same moment. Smith understands the complexities of abstraction and he uses both the surfaces and the structures of his works to create tensions that are palpable. His works are filled with suggestions of the familiar. They are both wondrous and comforting.

They are, in his words, As I Remembered.

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My studio practice is concentrated around employing abstraction to communicate the nuance and poetics of the human experience. I am interested in representing juxtaposing and contradictory truths found in how we relate to each other as beings influenced by both positive and negative aspects of society. My current paintings are inspired by personal narrative; stories that chronicle the conflicted realities present in day-to-day interpersonal relationships. I embrace the ambiguities of a more expressionist practice, populating my canvases with shapes that oscillate from amorphous to representational, and meaning that hover between the suggestive and the indecipherable. Construction lumber, cubed structures, veils, and shrouded bits of architecture are the repeating characters in my current abstractions. Both familiar and simplified in shape, I twist, contort and flatten these forms in space. Allegorically, my characters personify human gesture, embodying human emotion. They rival each other within a world articulated though color and spatial tensions, a world whose conditions aren't so different from ours.

- Leslie Smith III