Rollin Leonard — New portraiture — Xpo Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 28 → June 23, 2015

To date, Rollin Leonard’s work has been a systematic exploration of the human body’s digital afterlife. His photographed subjects are submitted to all kinds of algorithmic tortures, their limbs disjoined from one another or repeated indefinitely to create compositions that are abstract yet still recognizably humanoid.

In his forthcoming solo exhibition, New Portraiture, Leonard abandons the harsh angularity for which he is known in favor of more organic forms; he essentially moves from a mechanics of solids to a mechanics of fluids. Each individual piece is an exercise in liquid imagery and is produced through an elaborate photographic process.

From Leonard’s artist statement for the exhibition :

New Portraiture (2015) is a collection of photographic, semi-sculptural objects that are rearrangeable or flexible. The subject for the pictures are people flattened by uniform lighting and a depth of field where everything is in focus. The method for extruding the surfaces back into round objects varies: light is refracted and distorted in water, polygon matrices of the photographic surfaces are crumpled into heads, and an enormous plastic figure is skewed by the viewer’s perspective. The aesthetics of these objects are taken from digital manipulations. Words like “liquification”, “bulging”,” and “skewing” are used to name image manipulations in Photoshop but are, of course, only analogies. I wanted to rediscover the physical analogs of effects like these. In movie making there is a distinction between effects done physically, called practical effects, and those done in post-production, called visual effects. My effects are practical effects attempting to emulate the computer generated magic …"

Rollin Leonard developed this extensive new series of work to span three exhibition spaces. This exhibition is a collaboration between Transfer and Xpo Gallery and the artist’s first solo exhibition with the Paris-based gallery.

New Portraiture includes sculptural objects, installation, wall-based compositions and looped moving images from Leonard. The work manifests in large series, and is appreciated as objects and portrait commissions.