PAINTINGS | ANGELA LEACH
19.06.2004 | 05.09.2004
For over ten years, Toronto-based painter Angela Leach has been creating a series of acrylic paintings entitled Abstract Repeat. By sequencing colour in random order, these works offer vibrating fields of pattern that transform the picture plane through the resulting illusionary effect. While this expansive project presents quite a focused investigation of the optical properties of colour and line, the paintings, as well, evoke a physical experience within their strong visual presence.
In his essay The Dream of Painting and Angela Leach’s Thirty-Two Colours, Gordon Hatt writes,
In the mid-1980’s, Angela Leach studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and at Sheridan College’s School of Crafts and Design in Oakville, Ontario. Having been introduced to the discipline of painting at OCAD and to textile design at Sheridan College, Leach eventually found her way to a marriage of the two. In 1992, around the same time as she began working as a commercial hand weaver, she started working on a series of paintings called Abstract Repeat. 1997 marked the beginning of her signature Abstract Repeat Wave series, whose basic linear formula – the intersection of repeated horizontal simple waves with vertically repeated waves – has continued to present. With the intersection of these two waves at critical points, Leach creates the illusion of linear perspective. Each successive wave moving across the surface of the painting appears to taper and thicken in proximity to the next wave. This attenuation leaves the impression of a spatial recession characterized by a rolling wave. Leach then applies to these drawings a restricted colour palette of thirty-two colours that she organizes in complex repeating patterns. By repeating a sequence of colour placed in order from dark to light, for example, following the placement of the four darkest colours, she can complete a painting as a series of logical next steps. By altering the sequence of the colour key, Leach can create an almost infinite variety of unique colour patterns.
Though Leach’s detailed paintings recall the days of such artists as Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, her work is less influenced by the visual effects demonstrative of mid-twentieth century Op Art, as it is by her background and experiences as a weaver. In turn, traditional textile techniques - the intersection of the warp and the weft for instance - are as integral to the creation of a bolt of cloth as they are in their influence of the internal logic behind Leach’s own process and paintings.
Hatt adds,
While Riley uses elements of graphic design and colour theory to achieve her optical effects, Leach’s images are arrived at as intellectually conceived complex repeating patterns. Colour rarely plays an illusory role in Leach’s work. It is simply there. In thirty-two infinitely varying parts.
Angela Leach’s work has been included in many group exhibitions in Toronto as well as in Vancouver, Chicago, New York and Madrid. Recent exhibitions include Perspective 96, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Rococo Tattoo: The Ornament of Impulse in Toronto Art, at the Power Plant, TRANSlinear, organized by the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Technicolour at the Edmonton Art Gallery, and Shimmy, Cambridge Galleries, Cambridge, Ontario.
Organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Curator Joan Stebbins). Funding assistance from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts. Catalogue co-produced with Cambridge Galleries.
