neotericart

Beatriz E. Ledesma: Not Quite There Yet
Elephant Room Gallery
Chicago
June 13 – July 22, 2010

There is a richness and sense of place to the exhibition of Beatrice E. Ledesma “Not Quite There Yet”, currently at the Elephant Room Gallery. There’s a theme the artist establishes and celebrates which reaches for explanation while connecting the traffic of conception to development to completion. In this show, she has found ways to do such things in a fashion is both pleasing and, upon exploration, tenacious to the unexpected. There is range in her works.

“I decided to show Beatriz Ledesma’s work because she is an artist that is incredibly passionate about her beliefs and concerns with current society specifically in the U.S., but also around the world,” shared Kimberly Atwood, curator and gallery owner. “Her work is directly influenced by these beliefs and reflects quite obviously in all of her vibrant pieces.” She concludes, “I am also intrigued by her background in psychoanalysis and how she interweaves that into her art, resulting in a marriage of the two that makes sense to both viewers coming from either background.”

A sophisticated use of browns and yellow ochre presents an emphatic sense to, “Surrounded by Warmth”, oil on canvas. There is a depth in this use of color, as well as a subtlety. In one bottom corner Ledesma surrounds a small brown bird on a swath of red and green patch. There are touches of the primitive along side resolute strokes and pale wide-openness accomplished with brushwork. “I tend to cover the canvas with a yellow ocher or raw umber to strip it away with a cloth and then apply it again- as many times as the energy indicates,” says Ledema. “This process allows me to determine if there will be a source of light and where it will come from. There are times when there is no image but only the treatment process of the canvas. I trust that the image will come when it is time.”

There is poetry in the work, some of which smiles of a different time, and with the artist’s application, and her tints and tones of. The shapes and angles of her shades and figures supply a shyness, or strength of. A lipse of sort. It is as though a pre-verbal society has come alive. The artists shares, “Oils and watercolors were the media I worked with when at the Institute de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, so I trained on them. But as time has passed I have chosen to continue working with oils as they have a personality of its own- if I dip the brush into a tinny amount of pigment, it will colored more than I want to.” She continued, “There is warmth, they take time to dry, and I can go back many times as I want to work and rework an area; besides the layering process brings a depth to the image that I find highly attractive and visually pleasing to the eye.”

In her willowy,”2010″, oil on canvas, as in her, “From the Earth, to the Earth, Breathing”, the viewer is called to look and move deeper into the canvas. These pieces push and pull with their evolutions of shades of reds and yellow ocher. There is polish to this performance, with the artist’s layered, scratched canvas groans from the scraping and brush work.

The works of Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kathy Kollwitz, and the prints of William Blake in particular, have been very appealing and moving for the artist. They contribute to the dramatic expressiveness of as her figures, and appear distilled into her color. Ledesma notes, “When at the art institute of Buenos Aires, we were trained to look at the European masters; I felt particularly drawn to Flemish art for the use of oil in details and the light it seems to emanate from its paintings. The use of light & darkness, emotion and drama energy in these works also reflects this.”

This exhibition confirms the artist’s now confident engagement with color. Yet she does on occasion wrestle with her art. “I may ‘sacrifice it’, she jokes. “I actually fight with it- scream and insult at it or it may call for a complete slash of gesso upon the image worked The piece has to talk to me and if it does it after ‘our’ fight”.

In the narrative of her work, the artist makes a leap toward turning her philosophy into art. Absent are the abstract themes some strive to peddle as representative, or to separate the figure from the painting in its imagery. What one finds ultimately is graceful and pleasing in its rhythms, imperfections and all, hardly not quite there yet.

www.elephantroomgallery.com