BIRMINGHAM, Michigan—Who knew pink could so restively bully other colors? In the quadrant Pink Square, 1957–60, the hue monopolizes an entire panel and intrudes upon the three others, overruling the confining boundaries set by canvas. This immense work, one of Alfred Leslie’s multi-paneled mammoths, strikes one first upon entering Hill Gallery (the exhibition runs through February 28). Its architecture ruminates on the arbitrariness of borders and surprising articulations of power. Layers of paint trace the vestiges of what came before. Pink Square and the other massive canvases made from 1956 to 1962 permit an acute viewing of the artist’s evolving techniques in Abstract Expressionism.
Working as a painter and filmmaker, Leslie left Abstract Expressionism altogether in the mid ’60s for grisaille figurative painting, a maturation running against the grain of his peers. The six paintings on view are some of the most pivotal of his abstract stretch, and the majority of them haven’t been seen outside of storage since their creation.
An interdisciplinary artist, Leslie knows how to traffic different senses. Another giant in the show, Ornette Coleman, 1956, comparable in approach to the first, alternates between dripping paint and broad strokes. By naming the canvas after the jazz musician, Leslie conjures a synesthetic experience, invoking a lively soundscape of battling staccato and sonorous vocals. The paintings that the artist termed Abstract Illusionist display the technique to which he turned after Ornette Coleman and Pink Square: a crisper method reminiscent of collage. In Lake Front Property, 1962, casually resplendent with its bright palette and narrative qualities, beach elements are nailed down to their archetypal colors and then blown up to monochromatic rectangles, as if torn bits of paper. Biscuity sand, cerulean blue, sun-bleached and sunburned strips frame a chaotic smudge of strokes and movement at the painting’s center, huddled around some illegible summer scene.
Since Leslie’s oeuvre is frequently compartmentalized—sometimes severed—into his periods of abstraction and representation, the candid presence of one figurative painting is an important contextual aid. Though not technically part of the show, Afternoon Soaps, 1983, functions as a surprise bookend for his behemoths. The figurative work has an undeniable compatibility with Lake Front Property, encouraging a reading of correspondence between his works that is long overdue. The mammoths, in their riotous colors and immensity, of course are compelling on their own.
A version of this article appears in the April 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
