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Let Them Eat Cake, Virginia Leonard’s latest collection of work, is a joyous feast of exuberant colour inspired by the Sofia Coppola-directed film ‘Marie Antoinette’. In these strong, honest abstracts and semi-abstract landscapes, Virginia’s profusion of luscious and glorious colour mirrored from the film conveys a sense of the self-indulgent excesses of the 18th century French court of the Dauphin, Louis XVI and his young bride, Maria Antonia of Austria.
Leonard’s paintings have always been about colour and surface, the formal concerns of painting, rather than subject. These works demonstrate an evolution in her process. Feeling she had painted herself to an impasse using thick oils in the French Farm works, Leonard discovered the freedom of resin which allowed her to create her ‘layers of history’ by making marks on its smooth surface without creating the earlier impasto effect. These graphite, oil pastel or oil paint marks disturb the surface of the glossy resin and lend to the paintings a slippery tactility and a pleasing tension that ensures they are lifted out of the merely decorative. The sprayed-on underpainting and Virginia’s flourishes, loops and swirls provide depth of field and movement for the eye to follow. The reflective surface of the resin further engages the viewer as shadow and light play over it.
- Excerpt from catalogue
Elizabeth Caughey May 2008
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