Hector Leonardi: Allora

The Drawing Room is pleased to announce an online presentation of new paintings by Hector Leonardi with an illustrated digital catalog on the gallery’s website: www.drawingroom-gallery.com. While the gallery remains closed temporarily, we encourage those on the East End to keep an eye on our storefront window at 55 Main Street for a changing selection of exhibition highlights.

The unexpected and nuanced palettes of Leonardi’s recent paintings reveal the central role of color theory in his practice, an enduring trace of his graduate studies with Josef Albers during the 1950s at Yale University. Inspired by the infinite optical possibilities of abstract painting, his inventive approach to the acrylic medium evolves intuitively through a combination of direct brushwork and collage. Working on both intimate and large format canvases, Leonardi imbues each composition with exuberant shifting light effects, modulating tone and texture to attain a sensuous visual harmony.

Leonardi’s distinctive additive process affords him license to incorporate materials that might otherwise be discarded. Pigment stained paper towels and scraps of corrugated cardboard appear intermittently, and spark new avenues for image making. In creating his most recent paintings, the artist flicked paint-filled brushes directly toward the canvas, achieving a spectrum of pointillist splatters that pulse across the picture plane in a dynamic and lyrical cacophony.

See below for full press release and selected works.