Leslie Vansen: From Formal Gesture to Abstraction

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Image: The Alice Wilds

'Mizzle' by Leslie Vansen

Leslie Vansen, Mizzle, 2012, acrylic on canvas

Many threads run through Leslie Vansen’s exhibition at MOWA | DTN, “The Topography of Line” (through April 2). The show takes that most basic titular element and follows it across a range of dimensions from formal gesture to document to abstraction. It finally settles on pure metaphor, as a throughline connecting the work of a single practitioner and years of investigation.

Painting has ceased to be about masterpieces, or even mastery, for many years now. Even if my mother hasn’t received the memo yet, most serious painters think of their work as a part of a process; constantly becoming rather than seeking moments of objective success. Within this context, one looks for arcs rather than points, verbs rather than nouns, and finally setting up problems and chasing down impossible answers rather than engineering a single truth. 

This is especially true with Vansen’s practice, given the timeline of the work in the show, which ranges from 2000 to 2022. Despite the overarching journey, each painting in the exhibition carries its own weight. The energy in Diurnal, the earliest in the show, radiates beyond its human-sized canvas. Eddies of linear thatch anchor each quadrant of the painting which is bisected by a vertical ponytail of lighter linework. The relationship of her paintings to the body reflects the gestural scale of her marks as well as her relationship to figuration and bodies in motion. Like a divisionist or pointillist painting, the hairy accumulation of lines in Diurnal works to dampen the intense component colors. This allows a close examination of the painting to be a satisfying revelation of bright pinks, oranges, and greens popping in the creases like accent embroidery. The experience is macro and micro simultaneously, her lines working both as the structure of an allover composition as well as a dance of individual marks fleshing the whole thing out. 

Process and Mark Making

Another painting, Mizzle, from 2012, offers a slightly more uniform surface thought it clearly possesses a gestural, perhaps figural backbone snaking down from the top. Like several other works in the show, its general evenness seduces us into finer moments of process and mark making. The continuity, repetition, and similarity of linear forms breaks down when we zoom into the most minute details. The surface bears the craggy physicality of heavily worked acrylic paint; layering, masking, and erasures that accrete fittingly into a “topography” of marks. Surface, gesture, and form unite to create a sense of resolution. But only a “sense,” because one feels that her paintings are labored over and fought for and come to a stop rather than an end. They read as sudden moments of equilibrium…before a new painting is begun under the same pressures, and the process starts all over again.  

A series of graphite on paper drawings, Selections from the Sitelines Notebook, from 2008, offers insight into the foundations of the paintings in the exhibition. Beneath all the window dressing of elements and materials, every artist has some essential lifeforce, some compulsive vision, that garners names like “point-of-view” and “visual voice.” It’s something one can see when an artist draws on napkins while talking, in what they pick up while they hike, and in whatever it is they’d make on a desert island without an audience or supplies. The seven brilliant graphite-on-paper studies confirm Vansen’s linear DNA and her desert island self. Within this handful of works-on-paper lies an inventory of what line is capable: description and expression in organic and geometric marks, that are both minimal and maximal. 

Vansen’s search may be ongoing, but her relationship to that thing is a North Star-like constant. Structurally, the relationship between artistic essences and compositional instances isn’t unlike those of other metaphysics: Zen and motorcycles, shadows and cave walls, God and miracles. I would never project religion onto a secular practice, but it’s hard to deny that artistic searches are faith-based propositions. They’re not supernatural, but they are an attempt to attain something primary that can’t be fully known until it’s fully felt. In Leslie Vansen’s search, there is a line that we can follow with her across seven decades of painting and 42 years of instructing other young artists about the nature of their own voyages. The line is a pathway, a process, an element, a shape, and just maybe, the Thing itself.