All Things...

All Possible Worlds

We are hopeful creatures, and we desire a perfect world.
Desire, though, is double-edged. We seek to possess, and therefore to consume; this negates the object of desire. Or we worship that which we place on a pedestal and therefore out of reach; this withholds the object of desire. So we either lose what we desire, or never get it at all. It is something like a mirage. It always ends.
Hope, on the other hand, is boundless and endless. What we hope for may be realised, but our capacity for hope itself is rooted in our imaginative and extra-sensory selves. We can put a pot of gold at the end of any rainbow.
David Leapman paints the invisible delineation of desire and hope. Within the space of the picture plane, he sets out a painter's treatise on enigma, paradox and false dichotomy. Within the timespan of a painter's progress, he covers the territory of his own Utopia. This 'no-place' of the solitary imagination does not engage in Platonic shadowplay, for it manifests a profoundly humanist search for elusive knowledge: answers, questions and a happy ending. Bewilderment in the service of clarity is a dramatic and philosophical strategy that bridges mischief and complete seriousness, and it places faith in the possibility that all ends well.

David Leapman graduated from Goldsmith's College in 1981, the same year as 'The New Spirit in Painting' exhibition at the Royal Academy. One version of events goes thus: Young art students witnessed the dematerialisation strategies in art during the 1970s, and the resurgence of European and American painting. Their teachers and mentors, including veteran conceptual artists such as Michael Craig-Martin, guided these students as they negotiated a path between the conceptual gambits of the 1970s and the painterly tradition that had been disrupted in the 1960s. The outcome was an ethos rather than a school, a disparate collection of approaches that appealed both to a loosely postmodernist sense of plurality, and to an energetic art market.
The perception of a 'return of painting', is misleading; with no coherent critical paradigm or historical perspective, the only consistent aspects of contemporary painting are flux and crisis. But the convergence of critical and commercial acclaim that greeted painting in the 1980s restated its importance as a realm of continuous exploration, full of conceptual, aesthetic and technical wealth.
Explorers are often described as intrepid (although 'foolhardy' is usually more accurate), but this implies a sense of expectation and resolution that Leapman does not profess. During several hours that I spent in his studio, he did not once utter a definitive explanation of his paintings. Significantly, he did not expect a definitive explanation from me, either. This is characteristic of Leapman's artistic project, where every answer begs a question and where each painting involves both painter and viewer in a conspiracy. As with most conspiracies, agendas are hidden: Leapman's role and purpose shift and vacillate, he tails us from the front, he wrong-foots everyone including himself.
Each time a plausible interpretive framework springs to mind, an incongruity or glaring exception puts that interpretation into a 'Yes, but...' category, along with many others. 'Yes, but...' has appeared in discussions of painting before; Dore Ashton, the Vasari of the New York School, used the phrase as the title of her critical study of Philip Guston. 'Yes, but'. Affirmation, then qualification. Nothing is quite as it seems when one is encountering the world anew.
Nudge and Wink, Whiff and Hint cannot be incorporated into a neat theoretical or art-historical category. It can be partly explained by a set of semiotic hypotheses (along the lines of Lawrence Alloway's examination of the New York School ), which would focus on the anthropomorphic qualities of the forms, the apparent erotic drama that seems like a residue from neoclassicism. The clarity of setting, and the tension between the forms, bears comparison with Jacques-Louis David, but one aspect shared by two artists is spurious in isolation. It tells us something about how paintings work, and about how we see them, but almost nothing about the painting in question. Back to square one.
Or perhaps not. Leapman does not acknowledge any particular sources or influences, but he is an educated and aware painter who has absorbed and processed a myriad of influences. The processes of painting, viewing, and thinking, give life to his chimerical forms. Beyond the strictures of theoretical constructs and historical precursors, the sole constant equation in art holds sway: one creates, another beholds, and a phenomenon connects two imaginations. Shed all preconceptions, because they can only slow you down. Leapman's world rewards those who travel light.

Exploration begins with a drawn map. Every painting is descended from a complex of designed elements; some resemble displacement-behaviour doodles, others echo disingenuously 'unconscious' Surrealist automatism. Leapman's painting style determines which patterns survive this research process. He articulates form through discrete colour elements in hard-edge juxtaposition; differentiation between areas of colour is immediate. Leapman only selects those designs that can be represented through colour alone. The route from draft to completion is entirely conditioned by the possibility of rendering false the dichotomy of line and colour.
The forms in Concealed Usage and Transpire, amongst others, were once submerged in a sea of plausible ideas, until their innate qualities ensured their survival and transcendence into a colourful, autonomous and fully realised state. As with all modest moments of creativity, implications of the divine as never far away. Other painters, including Philip Guston and Barnett Newman, have worked with existential and procedural issues of creation, and Leapman is similarly engaged in a conversation between fugitive ideas, plausible fictions and those clearly presented statements which function as literal truth. At the end of every conversation, there is a tangible form - however intangible its basis for existing might be.
This point became clear to me when Leapman and I discussed the possibility of turning his two-dimensional forms into three-dimensional objects.
"How would you feel if you succeeded?" I asked.
"Disappointed, probably," he replied, grinning .
I would be amazed. The forms in a Leapman painting occupy a spatiotemporal grey area next to the Klein bottle, the Möbius strip, and Escher's endless staircase. There is no possibility of containing every aspect of a Leapman form in one conceptual bundle, and much of the fascination for the viewer is the protean nature of the works. What we marvel at today may be eclipsed by a new wonder tomorrow.
In other times and places, Leapman has exploited the photosensitive properties of day glo, night glo and ultraviolet paint, with installations that rely on a controlled cycle of fluorescent 'daylight', darkness and UV light. By changing the conditions of perception, one painting can thus become many. The ethos behind these installations remains not only in the continued use of photosensitive pigment, but also in the beguiling complexity of the forms we see. These paintings cannot work in isolation: they require the active viewer. In keeping with an aesthetic that is informed by conceptual art just as much as by modernist breakthroughs in painting, Leapman conditions what we see, and how we see, by drawing attention to how we think.

It is how we think, of course, that fosters the capacity of art to act as microcosm, analogy or metaphor. The conceptual structures we bring to an artwork are entwined with those that we apply to the whole of life, from how we cross the road to how we push the envelope of the imagination. Our entire lives are based on complex schemata and constant correction: we establish patterns, and then revise them according to the imperatives of existence (it is no coincidence that Sir Ernst Gombrich explained the development of art according to such a model ). The postmodern life may have lost any sense of coherent direction, and it may have lost sight of any satisfactory conclusions - no matter how illusory they were - but the significance of the decisions we make is in no way diluted by the possibility that we decide for ourselves rather than for a greater moral arbiter. We have been here before, when humanism made the universe anthropocentric, and the art of our time is indebted to that alignment of human endeavour and human purpose.
Such high ideals imbue the processes of art production with the capacity to illuminate everyday existence. The decisions a painter makes stand for the decisions on which we hang our lives. If some choices are tentative and uncertain, if they are points on a learning curve, then that is life stripped bare. Almost all choices are leaps into the unknown.
In Continuous Contest, Leapman engages with an integral aspect of technique and revises his approach. The pigments he uses are industrially produced, available in a plethora of tones and with a range of photosensitive characteristics. He does not usually interfere with these pigments, preferring to use them as readymade colour. The resulting clarity of tone, and luminescence of the pigment, suggests a brash confidence that is in keeping with the post-war tradition of using industrial paint. For Continuous Contest, though, Leapman has blended the pigments; the resulting palette contains more muted hues, a reduced differentiation between colour elements. Whereas in most works the composed forms seem to separate from the ground, in Continuous Contest they remain anchored. For Leapman, this shift in technique might lead anywhere or nowhere, but it is an essential part of the painter's journey. Every new path validates every path previously taken.

The painters who first worked in the fading glow of conceptual art did not have a clear path to follow. Leapman himself has wrestled with a consistent set of problems for a couple of decades, and this current set of works marks a stage on his journey. They contain the results of his research into some questions (especially those of line) and the beginnings of a new set of questions, including the handling of pre-mixed pigments. His forms are solid and coherent, but they always imply the possibility of collapse; they still seem as if they could change at a moment's notice. It is this sense of instability, of ultimate intangibility, that makes these paintings hopeful and optimistic. Leapman's journey continues, and he is committed to a long time travelling. He is not sure where he is going, but his paintings show where he has stopped so far. His capacity for hope, and the endless aspiration we can all comprehend, is present in every work. The viewer's role is to pick up that hope and run with it.
Astro-Aspirate can stand as a coda for this. The form is unusually clear, a four-limbed creature with an object on its back. This may be an air supply, and the vortex at its centre is a motif that Leapman has used elsewhere. It is a pit, it suggests for Leapman the idea of looking into a region without discernible end, and it suggests to me a vertiginous quest. The creature stands on a ground of mirrorflake. Even in a world of glittering perfection, we might still care to hope. We might still aspire to transcend the limitations of our perfect lives.

L. Alloway, "Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism", Artforum November 1973, 36-42.
Conversation with the author, London, December 2000.
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, Princeton, 1960.

James Lawrence

Selected Bibliography

2000

Roy Voss, Martin Herbert, Beaux Arts catalogue.

Julia Weiner, Primary Colours, Jewish Chronicle, Feb 00.

Work on paper, Stalke Gallery catalogue.

Cultural Ties, Westzone Publishing.

Artclub Magazine, Habitat, Spring 2000

1999
Young British Artists Ð The Saatchi Decade, Booth-Clibborn edition,
Arts Council Collection Saatchi Gift
1998
Domaine Public 10, Medamothi Artistic Cockpit
Lynn MacRitchie, Jerwood Painting Prize Ô98, Jerwood Foundation catalogue
1997
Mark Gisbourne, WHAT catalogue
Martin Herbert, Time Out, No.1401
John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 20, NMGM catalogue
1996
Martin Coomer, David Leapman, Todd, Flash Art, February, Vol XXIX No.186
Mel Gooding, Being There II, Centrum Beeldende Kunst, catalogue
Jane Burton, The East Wing Exhibition, Courtauld Institute, catalogue
1995
John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 19, NMGM catalogue
1994
Giodo Curto, Landscape, Flash Art, 11/94
Shark Infested Waters, The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s,
Sarah Kent, Zwemmer
Kim Sweet, Terra Incognita. The green, green grass of home, LandEscapes exhibition folder
Christopher Bucklow, Footnotes for an Unwritten Text, LandEscapes, associazione culturale VELAN-Spazio 9 ARTE catalogue
Sacha Craddock, The Times, 1/11/94
Sarah Kent, Time Out, No.1264
1993
David Lillington, Time Out, No.1154
Sacha Craddock, Moving into View, Arts Council
1992
David Lillington, Time Out, No.1054
Michael Bracewell, Mapping the Soul, Todd Gallery catalogue
1991
Devorah Knaff, A Delicate Balance at Art Works Gallery, The Press-Enterprise, 20/1/91
Jean-Charles Agboton-Jameau,
Hyunsoo Choi, David Leapman,
Forum International, No.9
1990
Aperto, Venice Biennale catalogue
Inland Empire, Los Angeles Times, 1/4/90
David Lillington, Time Out, No.1055
Robert MacDonald, Time Out, No.947
1988
Sarah Kent, Time Out, No.917
Jon Thompson, Pilgrim in the Land of Disbelief, Journeying in Search of Hidden Treasures, Ikon Gallery
Stuart Morgan, Figura; Rhetoric in Contemporary British Painting, Artscribe, No.72
Tony Godfrey, Figuring out the 80s, Laing Art Gallery catalogue
1986
Jerome Binde, Small Scale,
Lidewij Edelkoort Gallery catalogue
Between Identity/Politics, A New Art, Gimpel Fils catalogue
1985
Joanna Littlejohns, Impulse 8,
Gallerie Lohrl catalogue
1984
Marina Vaizey, Sunday Times, 9/9/84
John Russell Taylor, The Times, 4/9/84
Sarah Kent, Time Out, No.806
Sarah Kent, Artscribe, No.48
Sarah Kent, ÔThe Problems of PicturingÕ, Serpentine Gallery catalogue
1983
Marina Vaizey, Sunday Times, 23/4/83
John Russell Taylor, The Times, 26/4/83
Sarah Kent, Time Out, No.664
Nina Dimitryevic, Flash Art, No.113

Selected media coverage
1999
John Ellis, Our Internal Monologue,
CD Voiceprint
1997
John Ellis, Acrylic, CD, Optic Nerve
1996
Artists in the Open,
Whitechapel Open video
1995
John Moores Exhibition 19,
NMGM video
David Leapman

1959 Born London
Education
1977-78 St. Martins School of Art,
London
1978-81 Goldsmiths College,
University of London

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2000 Beaux Arts, London
1998 One in the Other, London
1997 Hales Gallery, London
1995 Todd Gallery, London
(also 1994, 1992, 1990, 1988)
1993 Galerie Raph Debarrn, Paris
1988 Journeying in Search of
Hidden Treasures, Ikon
Gallery, Birmingham

Selected Group Exhibitions
1999
Work on Paper, Stalke Gallery, Copenhagan, Denmark
Simmer, Beaux Arts, London
Recent Acquisitions, Beaux Arts, London
1998
The Jerwood Painting Prize, London
Leapman, Mullins, Cohen, Stalke Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark
The Art Works, Riverside, California
1997-98
John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 20,
Prize-winner, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1997
WHAT, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London
1996-98
The East Wing Collection Courtauld Institute of Art, London 1996
Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (also 1990,1986, 1980)
Being There II Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam
1995-96
John Moores Liverpool
Exhibition 19; First Prize-winner,
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1994
LandEscapes, including Callery, Gussin, Leapman, Winstanley
Ex Lanifico Bona Cariganano, Turin
XXVIe Festival International de la Peinture, British Council, Haut de Cagnes
1993-96
Moving into View: Recent British Painting; Arts Council Collection, Royal Festival Hall, London Ð touring as New Painting
1993
Strictly Painting, Cubitt Street Gallery, London
In House Out House; Unit 7, Camberwell, London
Pet Show, Union Street Gallery, London
Hyunsoo Choi et David Leapman,
Galerie Gutharc Ballin, Paris
Glenn Brown, Suzy Willey, David Leapman, Todd Gallery
1990
Aperto 90; Venice Biennale
1989
New paintings by David Leapman and Roy Voss, Curwen Gallery, London
New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and
touring show (also 1981)
1988
Figuring out the 80s, Laing Art Gallery & Museum, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
The Athena Art AwardÓ, Barbican, London
1986
Between, Identity & Politics Ð A New Art, including Hiller, Leapman, Spiro, Gimpel Fils, London and touring to The Arts Centre, Darlington, Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer, New York
Unheard Music, including Chadwick, Leapman, Wallinger, Stoke-on-Trent Museum
Small Scale, Lidewij Edelkoort Gallery, Paris
Nature Morte; Edward Totah Gallery, London
Impulse 8, including Goldsworthy, Leapman, Mach, Galerie Lohrl,
Monchengladbach
1984
Problems of Picturing, including Bevan, Leapman, Milroy, Toren,
Serpentine Gallery, London
1983
Young Blood - Leapman, Mach, Milroy, Opie, Riverside Studios, London

Collections
Arts Council of Great Britain
Victoria and Albert Museum
Contemporary Art Society
The British Council
Saatchi Collection
Stoke-on Trent Museum and Art Gallery
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Unilever