an Internet view on: Whitney Biennial Choice : Lesley Vance

image taken from david kordansky gallery website.
Poppies Burn Out Red, 2007, oil on linen, 10 x 8.9 inches (25.4 x 22.6 cm)


Decapitated heads - but somehow healthy. From years ago it would seem in relation to the potential that leaped,as if she has slightly transformed into another hybrid of forgotten masters-Lesley Vance's work unnerves with its little carvings into the fabric of reality. As if psychology had a razor and spontaneously zapped clean rectangular images, often only around the size of a regular sheet of 8.5x11 20#bond, into the Internet's murky obsession with the observation of the self and mandibles of dry rot bone stroke totems of memories for the art patron,the derision made evident in the technique. Bleeding organic decay and fresh rebirth deserves another lean in closer to her work. Cartoons on Saturday morning translated into polish wouldn't distract anyone from Lesley's work..
An early image of her work titled "Pile", seen online depicts what appears to be a stack of decapitated heads laying clean and impossibly bundled, so that all we see are flowing pretty heads of hair. They are neatly stacked wigs, combed out and shampooed is another thought were it not for their evident suggestion of a skull beneath.
The limitation to strange experiences a healthy expansion in that they are inexplicably stacked in a field of poppies or flowers of some vague variety-they are painted in a deliberate French impressionist style, contrasting with the the tight illlustrative detail of the hair. Painted in 2003, Vance's work developed in thought from angles only mentionable from discrete windowed fractures,half opened int he winter letting a chill creep up the spine and tickle the occipital ranch dressing and curtain rod of history's thought pattern.
Evidently pulling on a practice held by 17th century Spanish painters Juan Sanchez Cotán and Francisco de Zurburán, a 2007 exhibit decided to float and pull the experience into seductive detached environments. The still-life, made almost sarcastic and fascinating in the sudden unconscious collaging of art history associations. The deliberation of brush strokes left indicated is as if the brushstrokes themselves have been indicated by the layering of transparent varnishes. Darkness and intimacy, a sort of warmth creeps through this work. The practice is also supposed to be reminiscent of expressing the desire to reject values of the material world by painting objects from the mundane of daily life. Conch shells,mussels , a fawn's horn, flowers, some of these soggy bottom martians suckled the earth worms arm of malta. the
Latest abstractions by Vance are just as perplexing. They're not really abstractions. The modernist ideal of showing that in fact this is a painting goes into the past as much as the future. It says to us, "hello' i am a painting done in a 300 year old tradition, aged and also now like a photograph of a painting that has been painted. The abstraction is explored as the pop artists did in showing the physicality of the the application. The pixels and the hairs.