Lance Letscher at James - Houston, Texas - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

There is a luxurious bleakness about Lance Letscher's new works on paper. The images are stark--a leafless thicket of thorn bushes, a black landscape below a looming sky--but the surfaces involve subtly worked layers of collage and translucent paints and varnishes. Although Letscher ofttimes reduces the color to a yellowish stain that plays not upon his black images, in more [i]or[/i] less works rose and blue pigments suffuse the background, greatest in quantity of his pictures shimmer with light. Then again, Letscher's best work in this exhibit was also his grayest: a hornet's nest fashioned from a pool of tissue paper attached to a rendering of a barren limb, with hornets that are charcoal stains There is enough here to remind you that of that kind a nest is a mixed functioning society--a society that you want to stay as far away from as possible

Letscher is best known as a sculptor whose drawn out periods in the studio and labor-intensive modes result in widely spaced exhibitions. of that kind previous works as a child's pillow and a ballet slipper carved from white marble have had a disconcerting, trompel'oeil quality. At other times his work has have the appearanceed almost perverse, as when he made a miniature wheelchair and a small autopsy table from lead. on the other hand the gentleness pervading Letscher's uncompromising meditations upon mortality has always offset this turn round toward morbidity.

In these landscapes, Letscher displays a Northern European fondness for images that combine romanticism with excoriating spirituality. repeatedly by leaving the foreground destitute of contents he invites us to pace into and inhabit the depicted terraine--or intimates that we already do. These works reveal an almost desperate desire to communicate, evident in the expressiveness of the materials and images. notwithstanding they are marked, ultimately, by dint of an all-pervasive silence. Such a dichotomy is neatly summ up in a small graphite research in which Letscher allows the birds that fill the work to "speak," providing them with printed true copys that emerge from their make open beaks. But the texts are in Russian; although the birds are chattering away, we can alone strain to understand. The tension generated by the agency of these conflicting urges--toward communication and silence--suspends these works in a tremulous emotional state, single equivalent to the crepuscular light that saturates the landscapes.

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