Abby Leigh’s new painting Lipstick hides its visceral qualities behind a layer of refinement. A restless experimenter with process and materials, Leigh never lets them take over, preferring to temper them with a strong sense of compositional purpose. Ultimately, qualities as basic (but crucial) as the way paint sits on a surface remain paramount. Lipstick is a rhythm of hot colors – reds, oranges and pinks – which packs a remarkable visual punch from across a room. The amped-up colors are quickened through the vibration between edge and expanse in each horizontal passage; here the artist takes some of the tools of op art, but co-opts them. Because on close-up looking, we see her consistent painterly sensibility quieting down the movement into something more serene. It’s a rather astonishing trick: to make colors this intense ultimately feel calm. Yet by anchoring them in two solid but open and wider parallels of pale yellow, and, even more significantly, by giving an extraordinarily subtle blur to her edges, she pulls it off.
Leigh’s finely honed sense of materiality drives much of what she does. By using harder surfaces in this body of work – wood and aluminum panels – there is a propensity towards thinness in the layering effects she achieves. That is not to say that these effects seem in any way insubstantial; rather she achieves a hovering, floating, ethereality that almost seems surprising given the often rigid geometry that structures this series on the whole.
This can lead to some enticing and seductive optical sensations – in Bridge 1 for example, a harder universe of blues creates a rupture between gauzy disintegrating veils of yellow. The tension along the edges between the two is musical enough that your eyes convey to your body a physical sensation about the way this movement works.
The artist explores other types of ruptures in her new drawing series. Again, thin layering is a great interest, here among gray washes and harder spiraling lines of graphite and charcoal. In some, red spills forth as if from gashes and breaks in the careful forms, providing an almost sinister edge. Leigh continues to push abstraction forward, proving that the most traditional materials can still advance formal vocabularies. Her recent work is not about breaking fully out of older approaches, but rather about refining and personalizing them out of a clear desire to keep finding more and more nuance.
Carter Foster