The African American visual artist, Leslie Smith III, offers his second solo exhibition in Spain in the gallery PONCE+ROBLES. He is well known for his abstract oil paintings on shaped canvases, with bright colors and gestural brushstrokes, clearly influenced by expressionism. His work focuses on the use of abstraction as a way of communication for the human experience's poetics. The opening of the exhibition, on September 15th, coincides with the Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend 2016, held from 15th to 17th.
“Time Further Out”
Inspired by the late Dave Brubeck 1961 album, “Time further Out”, Smith’s recent paintings explore notions of time in ways that alter shape and form. Smith delves into the uncertainty of modular forms as the basis of his paintings’ construction. He joins shapes together with lyrical motives that allude to the interpersonal and gestural narratives at the helm of his creative practice.
“Time Further Out” investigates the prospects of sequencing content over more than one canvas, where themes are developed in stages. In doing so, time synchronizes with space both literally and perceptually. The challenge presented with Smith’s “Time Further Out” is one’s ability to succumb to a fractured sense of pictorial space in order to process the subject within the personal confines of the mind.
Smith is informed by minimalist ideologies, particularly, Post Painterly Abstraction and New Geometric Conceptualism. Dimensional expansion of perceived two- dimensional space is at the core of Smith’s project. He questions principles of multi- dimensional geometries, creating unconventional viewing experiences, in which alternative pictorial spaces operate allegorically. In lieu of early 20th century fourth dimensional antidotes, “Time Further Out” reconsiders multiple dimensionalities contrary to cubism; where triangle facets represent an array of planes and angles seen from different points of view dismantling the matrix of realism. Leslie Smith III restructures the matrix of abstraction on a scale that encompasses painting as both object and image.
