Leis' Former Sandia Park Studio (2006)
Following find the complete essay text by William Zimmer,
a contributing art critic to The New York Times,
pertaining to Leis' Blue Series.
Beyond the Blue Horizon
Marietta Patricia Leis' ambitious Blue Series is very much in the American Grain.
The enormous Hudson River Landscapes of the mid-19th century presented the country as a new Eden, a
nd sheer expanse has been an abiding subject matter. In abstract painting that sense of grandeur with
a purity about it has been called the "the abstract sublime." Leis' more recent antecedents include
the "zip" paintings of Barnett Newman which represent the individual alone in the universe, and the
paintings of Mark Rothko with their ineffable translucent fields.
Sometimes the meaning and significance of a new body of work is brought out by contrasting it
with a previous one. Leis' Tintoretto series (1996) was worldly and full of bounded objects.
It celebrates Marietta Tintoretto, the daughter of Jacopo Tintoretto, the great Venetian painter.
That she was a mainstay of her father's workshop has long been known, but Leis, through research in Italy,
established Marietta Tintoretto as a great artist in her own right. Many pieces in the series resemble altarpieces.
Such intense involvement with materiality led Leis by degrees to the mesmerizing emptiness of the Blue Series.
But the evanescent, somewhat mystical side of the earlier series remains active.
A strong sense of individuality led Leis to drop configurations and content in the ordinary
sense and to pursue captivating blue harmonies alone. The emptiness and large scale is meant
to envelop the viewer and provide a sensation that bypasses the intellect, suspending critical
thought at least for the moment. Leis as referred to the sensation as "falling into the void"
and she enables a viewer to experience it by hanging her large paintings close to the floor.
Such earthly measures enable infinity.
In her incantatory statement that accompanies this series, Leis invokes Emerson and, implicitly,
Transcendentalism. Transcendence is both the content and the aim of the Blue Series, but this tall
order can be achieved only if the work is well made. These paintings are handsome objects, their object-ness
reinforced by the painterly attention paid to an edge of each painting. The importance of the edge was a canon
of color field painting, the dominant abstract style of the 1960s but in Leis vision the edge has renewed
force as a transition from the worldly to the sublime.
William Zimmer
New York City
September 2003
William Zimmer is a contributing art critic to The New York Times.
|
