On view in this exhibition are twelve paintings and sixteen works on paper. The paintings, approximately 50 x 50 inches, have emerging central forms. Their surface colors reverberate and the equilibrium shifts forward and backward. According to Leigh, the paintings call to mind Cezanne’s description of what the experience
of looking at a painting should be:
“Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them…one sees nothing but a great
colored undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of color. This is what a
picture should give us…an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a
colored state of grace. Lose consciousness.”
Leigh’s drawings are made solely of smoke. The smoke is skillfully channeled into formats of targets and stripes. Like the paintings, the targets’ closely modulated tonalities shift in space: that which appears to be forward recedes when viewed as a whole. The stripe drawings, processional in their composition, are no less active. The density of the smoke, from almost transparent to charcoal black, is as animated as a bar code. These drawings with their clean edges and unsentimental form exhibit no traces of romanticism.
This recent body of work is a stylistic departure from past work, but Leigh says, “My preoccupations as a painter remain consistent, although my style may change. My work is always involved with transparency, both physical and metaphorical. I try to decode what I see around myself and translate the world into two dimensions.”