Leslie Smith III at Hawthorn Contemporary: Paintings or Sculpture?

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Photo courtesy of Hawthorn Contemporary

The works in Leslie Smith III’s new show at Hawthorn Contemporary, “WE STILL PLAY WITH BLOCKS: Paintings from 2014-2017,” reside somewhere between painting and sculpture. Well, not really, somewhere, they live in the liminal crease where one becomes the other, and in doing so questions the integrity and modalities of either enterprise.

The title alone tells you most of what you need to know about the exhibition. It suggests building, which is essentially additive sculpture, while declaring the works to be paintings. And true to form, the examples in the show reflect this most calculated duality. A sleek 5 x 7-foot parallelogram-shaped painting on the north wall is upon closer inspection comprised of at least eight individual shaped canvases connected together like pieces in a puzzle. They are the “blocks” mentioned in the title. Really sophisticated blocks, that happen to carry the loaded history of abstract painting on their sides and faces. The work is titled Redacted, further complicating the identity of it and its components. Blocky horizontal brushstrokes traverse the surface of the piece, jumping borders between abutting canvases. Like Franz Kline’s bold black bands of pigment, Smith III’s paint strokes begin abstract but finish in the representational universe. Only instead of materializing into a bridge or a building, as Kline’s often did, Smith III’s marks refer to blacked out text–the language being redacting here seems to be that of abstract painting.

Toggling Back and Forth

Smith III teases us a little as he toggles back and forth between image-based vignettes and abstract constructions. Ready or Not, features a simple image of bars peeking from behind an overlaid white flap. The cockeyed canvas with a not-so-golden ratio of 26 x 29.5 reinforces the piece’s extra-painterly objecthood, while the simplicity of the tableau on its face emphasizes its pictorial ambiguity. There are moments in the show where the commentary about these two languages becomes so subtle that it’s difficult to know how intentional Smith III’s choices are. For instance, in Second Chance another conglomeration of conjoined canvases, is skewed just enough to let us know his intention to split painting and constructivist sculpture down the middle. The painted drop shadows add to the accumulated ambiguity. Only a clunky gradient of transparent magenta interrupts the mounting tension in the piece. It remains unclear whether its imperfectness is a strategy to add to the painterliness of the work or whether it’s simply a imperfectly executed passage.

Other flourishes of paint like the ones crisscrossing the brilliant 4 x 10-foot Frankenpainting Redaction seem more measured. The conversations between flat and glossy paint, sometimes brushed, sometimes rolled across multiple panels, keep this work hovering effortlessly above categorical distinctions between painting and sculpture; mechanical and handmade, formal and pictorial. It’s one of the more remarkable examples of a painting-as-sculpture I’ve seen in a while. And it just happens to be a badass formal arrangement, with its Motherwell-esque scalloped verticals against creamy yellows, all pierced by a painted red horizontal bar that continues out the side of the center construction like an arrow.

17 years ago, my painting teacher Michael Brennan remarked in a group crit that “the bar was really high for the shaped canvas.” He unleashed a litany of practitioners opting employing the idiom. It was meant not as derision, but as a cautionary message to a painter who was simply hoping an unorthodox substrate would redeem an otherwise uninspired 2-dimensional vision. My prof also suggested later though, as our group scattered into individual conversations, that that bar was also worth reaching, but more in terms of sculpture than painting. It’s almost as if Leslie Smith III was listening in on that session. I think he knows he is standing on the shoulders of giants like Carl Andre and Robert Mangold, but he’s reaching sweet new sculptural fruit rather than simply taking a piggyback ride on some painters’ backs.