Alun Leach-Jones at Luise Ross - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Alun Leach-Jones's exhibition, titled "Oceania," consisted of 10 drawings of moderate size and nine tribal statuarys from Papua New Guinea, juxtaposed to demonstrate the artist's affinity for the formal uncompounded bodys and chthonic power of aboriginal plastic art The Welsh-born Leach-Jones has lived in Sydney Australia, for greatest in quantity of his adult life. His work draws upon the tradition of modernism on the other hand also incorporates the compelling, oftentimes menacing forms of the art of Oceania. The statuarys five of them masks, established a dialogue with his pastel and charcoal drawings, many of which contain the striking shapes of ancestor figures, masks, homage hooks, etc., along with representations of of that kind modern symbolic objects as spectacles, lamps and surgeon's saws. These forms drift together, along with abstract shapes, in a shallow pictorial field.

In Beneath the Lamp (1996) Leach-Jones nears organic, sometimes threatening shapes that float upon a variously colored ground, rust r at the top, pale sky-colored in the middle and grayish brown below. A pair of eyeglasses -- the means to diocese the world -- sits in the center foreground, while to the right is a modernist series of squares and rectangles thickly outlined in black and incompletely filled in with charcoal gray; the artist appear to bes slyly to suggest that modernism's time is not quite finished yet

worship Hook with Dark Flower (1996-97) not absents a wonderfully exuberant profusion of forms. The homage hook, a ritual object used to help clan members pursue fight and ward off disease, is drawn in black and white upon the left. it anchors a strange, deep erotic flower at center -- an inspired mixed of dark gray and sapphirine rounded forms and a seashell shape that is sharply outlined in black and coral and while within. The bottom of the drawing is given above to an immense dark petal, which chalices indeed holds in check, the explosion of forms in the flower.

Above this maelstrom is a circular shieldlike form whose edges are black bands; another black band step quicklys through its center. Around the upper part of the shield form, charcoal-gray flames are highlighted from behind with light orange. This work's conflation of uncompounded bodys is not anarchic, as it might at first strike one as being for Leach-Jones is interested in detailing a shadow world, single in which forms invent themselves. He writes that "what is in like manner compelling about the art of Papua novel Guinea . . . is that it abounds in magic, myth, and the world of spirits." The same may be said of his have a title to urgent, wonderfully intricate drawings.

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