NYAB Event - Hector Leonardi Exhibition

Hector Leonardi Exhibition

Dillon Gallery

This event has ended.

Dillon Gallery presents its second one-person exhibition of paintings by Hector Leonardi. Completed in the last two years, the work highlights the extraordinary creativity and productive energy of a master of color and light.

Early on, the distinguished art critic John Russell identified Leonardi as the premier pupil in the United States of Josef Albers and praised his evocation of light, calling his painting “a work of wonderment.” More recently, writing in Art in America, critic Lyle Rexer lauded Leonardi’s art as a passionate defense of the pure visuality of painting.

Leonardi graduated from Yale with a MFA in painting in 1955 and was later a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and a Critic’s Award winner at the prestigious Tokyo Invitational. He came of age in the exciting milieu of a diverse second generation of American abstract painters, including Jules Olitski, Adolph Gottlieb, Sam Francis, and Richard Diebenkorn. The idiom Leonardi has developed reflects an awareness of all these sources as well as of the work of pioneering abstractionists Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Yet he harnesses their insights to a very different end. Deeply influenced by the East End light in his Bridgehampton studio, Leonardi owes perhaps his greatest debt to the Impressionists and their followers, to mavericks such as Signac and Seurat. He untethers color from the burden of description and achieves a luminosity that only Rothko attempted. Unlike most of his abstractionist counterparts, Leonardi has never been content to mine the same imagery or to pursue a signature style. His work of the last decade in particular has ceaselessly pushed forward into new emotional and visual territory.

The thirty-eight paintings in the current exhibition show the artist at his most innovative, combining his knowledge of color and light with complex experiments in texture. On a tonal foundation of color, Leonardi builds intricate structures of acrylic fragments and over-painting to create fields in which a variety of abstract gestures, from incised marks to single drips, can coexist and enrich each other. He evokes line and form by juxtaposition. These are painterly, passionate surfaces, diaphanous and fragmentary, replete with visual contrasts suggestive of both tragedy and celebration. Leonardi has the supreme ability to unite opposites and reconcile contradictions. For poet and critic John Yau, the paintings have a deeper meaning, creating “metaphors to help one see.” For viewers, the result is a dramatic and engrossing experience, one capable of renewing faith in painting as an art of maximum risk and maximum reward.