Intersections: Recent Work by Mark Leonard

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Leonard’s paintings is the sheer old-fashioned respect for painterly technique. Leonard uses a light ground, not a flat white but rather a softly diffused atmosphere that seems to dissolve away beneath the overlaid pattern. The interwoven bands of color are more material than flat stripes of color, and, indeed, the word ‘strip’ of color would be preferable to convey the formal presence of the weave. So light and airy are the strips that the tangible colors seem to have been airbrushed. But the strokes are laid on one by one in small increments that can be seen close-up.  
 

At Louis Stern Fine Arts, Leonard shows 17 paintings and 14 drawings in which a linear grid is rendered as a loose, open weave.