Review of Tom Leaver at McKenzie Fine Art
Around everything that is perfected, the unfinished ascends and intensifies
— Rainer Marie Rilke
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
I was walking through the Lower East Side at 4 pm, which felt like 10 am, on a rainy afternoon. Across the street unfolded a river, languidly resting between a conglomerate of petrified trees that were dark and earthy. I jumped over a puddle and went inside the gallery. On the walls were many of these paintings and at first, spinning around in the room, it was like being inside a haiku composed many times over.
The artist Tom Leaver is a painter who dons rubber gloves, dips his fingertips into the palette, and spreads gestures across the canvas. To him, it is an act of meditation, the procession of time throughout a day distilled into an image. Aptly, he titles this series under three headers: “Month,” “Juncture,” and “Day.” The “Month” paintings are the largest canvases, the set of “Juncture” is middle sized, and the “Day” series is the smallest of the bunch. Here Leaver poses a compression and an elongation of time, a differentiation between a month and a day, and a question about what this juncture exactly is.
The paintings place the viewer along a river. It cannot be said which way it is flowing. Across the canvases there tends to be a hint of pink or purple placed at the vague horizon where sky and earth meet. The rest is composed from the brown of the land and the pale tan of the sky, and this timid breath of color, almost suffocated between its dominant counterparts, is either a rising or a setting sun. I like to imagine these landscapes from the eyes of a lonely wanderer making their way through them. They do not know where they are going to or where they came from. They do not know if they are walking backwards or forwards. If they are taking a last wistful gaze at what is behind them and letting it be buried by the turpentine forgetfulness streaming down in drips over the surface of the canvas, or if they are trying to penetrate further into a haze of turpentine future. They are lost in both a physical and a temporal sense, but they continue to look for a way out.
Days 3, 2020, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy McKenzie Fine Art, New York.
If these paintings can drift in either direction, then it can be concluded that they have no direction at all. They are still, but not stagnant because to proclaim that would be to say that these images are unremarkable, which they are not. Rather, under their stillness, there is a tension that rushes like blood under the skin. This is the tension of delayed motion and of choice, that which pulls the present into both the future and the past, that present which has and will be broken and remade endlessly. The turpentine in these paintings highlights the intrinsic fragility of the present through its interaction with the rest of the image. It signifies, in its drips which stain the image beneath them, that this after all is a painted image and subsequently only the illusion of an instant. This phantasmagoric quality extends across all elements of the painting. There is a cloudy quality to the forms of the trees. The colors sift and reach out into each other, creating a visual and temporal liquidity. The components are organized primarily in a poetic manner, and secondarily in the manner of the painted landscape.
It must be again stated that Leaver’s paintings are figurative and imaginary, even abstract. Yet where many works depart into abstraction in a cool and emotionless matter, through a methodology that is dominated by pedantic theory and aesthetic philosophy, Leaver retains feeling, and puts its forefront in his canvas. His work is akin to the Abstract Expressionists, and its mood is overall most similar to the tranquility of a Rothko or a Newman. Like those painters, there is more or less an adherence to one form, that of the trees under a white sky with water coming through the middle. Each canvas is undeniably this motif, yet each is set apart from the other in a meticulous treatment of the motif’s subtleties. In one, the valley may be more open and gain a sense of melancholy emptiness. In another, it is only the treetops, which lends an uncanny sense of adventure to the viewer as if they have just climbed out of the forest through which they were walking. Then there are the smaller Day canvases, which explode in color around a pool of water as if it were the life-giving spring from which the river bursts forth. In a literal sense one may view these as a variety of images of a regional landscape, which due to their abstraction are actually the images of a naturally fragmented human consciousness.
Juncture 3, 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches. Courtesy McKenzie Fine Art, New York.
Thus, because the artist recognizes his source as internal, he encodes in his paintings the imperfection of a humanity always in flux, always incomplete. The turpentine is one element that does so. The other is the unusual white sky, which starkly rules over the land beneath it. Compared to the ground, it has an uncompromising simplicity of form and color. It is simply bright, without shadow and without shape, as if it were solely the light. In its austere consistency across the canvases it is simultaneously their most confident and most nascent aspect. It is light, but it is also the unassuming and modest color of a canvas. Despite its absolute quality, the light does not penetrate the ground of the landscapes. They remain dark and shadowy, and harken towards another time of day than the sky, or another place altogether. This discrepancy highlights the most lasting element of these paintings: the melancholy wasteland.
The overwhelming sepia tone brought forth by the contrast between sky and land is reminiscent of the decaying filter placed over the intro in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. In that film, the sanguine brown is relegated to a dilapidated and empty urban production area. It fills empty warehouses, glances over piles of trash, flakes off the side of worn brick buildings. It is well suited to the dying industry that was left like skeletons across the fading Soviet state. In Leaver’s work, this same quality is reserved for nature. There is no visual analogue to the dead landscape he paints in the natural world. Rather it is like the desert has been transplanted into the primordial jungle, killing then fossilizing it, and indicating that although we may look, there is no life here to return to. The romantic search for a painted paradise, a primeval, is transplanted into a modern context and leads to an absolutely ambiguous result that points neither directly forward nor back, but rather out. Like Courbet’s marines, and Turner’s late stage storms, Leaver’s work dives headstrong into the turbulence lying just beyond the shore, and poses the question: What exactly is it that we are creating? //
Months 2, 2020, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. Courtesy McKenzie Fine Art, New York.