| Hector Leonardi is the best-kept painting secret in New York. For 60 years, this student of Josef Albers at Yale has been exploring ways to create gorgeous textures on canvas. In that time, especially in the last decade, he has followed a relentlessly experimental path that has never surrendered the knowledge he has gained of color and light. Leonardi works in acrylic, on medium-sized canvases, combining the disparate approaches of the stain and the collage. His underpainted surfaces provide glowing foundations of color, upon which he builds his complex effects. | 
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Lyle Rexer
Courtesy of the artist.Hector Leonardi is the best-kept painting secret in New York. For 60 years, this student of Josef Albers at Yale has been exploring ways to create gorgeous textures on canvas. In that time, especially in the last decade, he has followed a relentlessly experimental path that has never surrendered the knowledge he has gained of color and light. Leonardi works in acrylic, on medium-sized canvases, combining the disparate approaches of the stain and the collage. His underpainted surfaces provide glowing foundations of color, upon which he builds his complex effects. In his second exhibition at the Dillon Gallery, these range from cascades of acrylic fragments whose opulence recalls the Viennese Jugendstil and Klimt, not to mention Monet’s very different excess, to more molten or leaden textures, where the paint is congealed to an impenetrable density, but shot through with brilliant gold or silver light.
In many of the paintings, the artist explores what colors might possibly belong together, and what those different hues coax out of each other. His blacks and browns become positively loquacious in the presence of gold, red, and even green. The current dogma has it that this is the age bequeathed by Judd, Stella, and Warhol of industrial color and nonexpressive surface: let the viewer alone, tell no stories, and pull on no coattails. Artists are warned away from the elaboration of texture and the exploration of an “aesthetic” vocabulary. All gestures are allowed to live only between the quotation marks of self-reference. Leonardi’s work is old and wise enough to ignore such prohibitions, always faithful as a lover to his vows—and pleasures.
These pictures may be unfettered, but their structures are clear and productive: the grid and the vertical line. At the same time, there’s conflict and danger here, roiling collisions that break the grid, colors that seem to overwhelm the vertical order and expand out like a supernova. It is almost impossible to keep a distance on this action, impossible for the eye not to explore, but even in the sweetest work, the ones of pink and yellow, this seduction can become a fall, a kind of visual delirium, whose escape we no longer desire.
In the current exhibition, Leonardi seems to be in pursuit of nothing so much as his own surprise, which, for a master—and for viewers who want to see what paint can do—is the only place to be.
