LeCompte’s Move from Circle to Grid More than a Simple Shifting of Shapes
By Victoria Dalkey
Published Apr. 10, 2011
Sacramento Bee
For 25 years, Michaele LeCompte explored the permutations of a singular form, the circle. Recently, her work has morphed to a different form, the grid. One would think that with such spare subject matter, the work would be dry and rigid, but LeCompte’s recent work at Jay Jay is rich and evocative. “I am interested in primal forms,” she said at the gallery, “universal forms. I don’t pick them; they pick me.”
She hasn’t completely abandoned the circle, as a series of collages made up of old paintings recycled into new compositions attests, but her larger works, oils on canvas, stick to the grid. That could be boring, but there is a lot of variety to the ways she approaches the grid. Beginning with a fairly strict arrangement of rectangles, the grid slowly opens up and becomes irregular. Lush color gives way to gray tones.
“Aerial” is a concert of lovely hues, delicate as pastel candy hearts, apple green and lavender singing in chorus. In contrast, “Shifting Alignments” is all dark tones, black and dense grays intermixed with pale grays and creams in a checkerboard pattern on the lower half of the painting and big, aggressive patches of shiny and matte black on top. More subdued and elegiac in feeling is “Degrees of Gray” inspired by a poem called “Oltremarino” by the late Sacramento poet and art critic Quinton Duval. In “Oltremarino” the speaker of the poem laments the lack of blue on a gray day.
“And as the rain fell down, silver/dropped from the corrugated tin/roof edge,” the poem begins and chimes immediately with the gray squares and rectangles in LeCompte’s painting. Though the speaker of the poem is “blue” (sad, that is) LeCompte does not find gray a depressing color. “There are such beautiful warm and cool tones in gray,” she said. “It’s a kind of a chameleon, the way light falls on it, varying by the seasons.” “I wanted to honor the depth and richness of the poem,” she added, noting that in this work, the grid began to open up. “It was an important painting for me,” she explained. “It released the space and in it I began letting the joints of the grid open up.”
Late works become increasingly open to new elements. In “Untitled (Baroque),” she adds suggestions of patterns and textures to the grid, further opening up the forms until in “Migration of Form,” she gives us a diptych in which Matisse-like looping forms and lacy, fabriclike passages add to the richness of the works.
In “Migration of Form” (which is also the title of her show), she begins to incorporate the investigations she has been making in her collages, which often remind one of Matisse’s cut-paper works. Among the standouts are “Black Vase,” with its singing color and arabesque forms along one edge, and the springlike “Louver,” with its quixotic central form, slats like those found on blinds, and a sprig of leafy markings all dancing in delicate tones of white, gray and cream.
“The large paintings were so demanding,” she said, “and became so restricted in color that I felt driven to have something wild and ridiculous.” The collages gave her the freedom to try new things, to explode the grid with works permeated by a playful spirit, evident in “Smoke Rings,” a bold and colorful collage in which she returns to the circle, playing it across a recessive grid. “What binds me to the process,” she wrotes in a statement accompanying the show, “is the transformational aspect of painting – how paint becomes something with presence and meaning and emotion. It’s the poetry we can’t force into the paint – and yet, it’s the poetry I always yearn for.”
