Leslie Wayne, One Big Love #33, 2009, 11 x 9 inches, oil on wood
Leslie Wayne, One Big Love, #26, 2009, 11 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches, oil on wood
Leslie Wayne, One Big Love #32, 2009, 9 3/4 x 12 3/4 inches, oil on wood
Leslie Wayne is showing a group of 17 new works at Jack Shainman Gallery through July 16. For years Leslie's paintings have explored extremes of physicality and scale. With this exhibition, she continues to push the envelope, creating minuscule objects that really read as wall-mounted sculpture even though they are made of oil paint on a flat surface. While some pieces are made by peeling from the surface and folding thick layers of half-dried paint -- as in One Big Love #32 -- other works appear to be assembled out of loose chunks of accumulated paint, like primal fetish objects. The paint is used almost like clay, but with inherent luscious color. Within this process of layering and scraping and folding and adhering, the artist gains access to deep personal resonances, becoming immersed in a continuum of shaping -- ultimately arriving at a group of tiny objects that are intensely charged with energy and feeling.
