Leslie Amine

“The world into which Leslie Amine’s paintings plunge us conjures up spaces which we might situate in the tropics, in the sweltering air. Juxtapositions of richly depicted different places and moments remind us of the extremely detailed and delicately crafted descriptions by the writer V.S. Naipaul in his novels. The acidity of certain colours and the association of contrasting areas of colour which collide give rise to a tension in the pictorial space of the pictures. This state prompts us to perceive both a kind of melancholy and an insular fatalism, from which emerge explosions of energy, reminiscences of forms, faces, silhouettes, masks and statuettes which get our visual memory working, and act on our feelings. […]
The attention given to a rich technical gamut is developed over the whole surface of the canvases, and also on wooden panels whose appearance even reveals a certain violence in the plastic interventions. This wish is intended as the echo of demanding research which may extend as far as the deliberate accident in the confrontation with the painted surfaces. […]
The plastic vocabulary which comes to us by analyzing the surfaces is rich: impasto, crossing out, squirt, streak, flat tint, splash, gradation, blending, superposition… […] This great pleasure in the mixing of the painter’s gestures, which we might connect in some ways with what we can observe in David Salle’s and Daniel Richter’s work, as well as a great exuberance in the use of colour and the formal idea, lend this painting a character that is the opposite of deceptive. Responding to the grinding of paint and pigments, the thematic language of the pictures, painted like palimpsests, appears like a medley of hybrid references somewhere between phantasmagorical vision, neo-Expressionism, and pattern painting.” […]

Excerpt from the essay by Alain Fraboni, for the exhibition Distractions, L’attrape-couleurs, Lyon, 2013
Translated by Simon Pleasance, 2015