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In her first solo exhibition, Daphne
Leighton is showing two series of paintings: the first, earlier
series is of cars and parking lots; the second of figures. The two
series are very different yet have much in common.
The perspective in the car paintings is that of a spectator looking
down at a distant, uninhabited spaceu. Even if people do appear they
are impersonal, remote, at a random moment by a garage or on their
way to their cars from the supermarketv. The paintings resemble an
arena where cars play games or perform a static dance. Thus cars -
whose essence is movement - appear as stationary objects without
drivers in a moment before or after. The relationships between the
cars themselves and with the surrounding space are what create the
alienated, urban drama. The cars become like actors, metonymies for
people. Some of the paintings in this series depict the marks that
the cars have left behind them: where they had stood, the asphalt is
dry while around we can see signs of rainw. The empty, silent cars
and the traces of their absence give the feeling of a distant point
of view – a memory, perhaps, of loneliness and alienation.
The style of these paintings is like a restrained expressionism. The
paint is sometimes applied with free brushstrokes and is sometimes
flat. Photographs have clearly been used as source material; this is
particularly apparent in the cut off compositions. The Talpiot
industrial zone is recognisable in the paintings but also becomes an
anonymous “anywhere.”
While the first series works on feelings of distance and
uninvolvement, the second series draws us closer to the drama itself
and to the figure and its world – to men and women. A nude woman
stands in a cold, alienated scene of metal pipes and corrugated iron
in one paintingx; in another a portrait of a woman is blurred and
stainedy while male figures look like soldiers with guns in
transitory surroundingsz. These figures indicate the scene of the
struggle and suggest a sense of terror, fear and estrangement. A
naked figure in a neglected, threatening urban environment brings to
mind Pamela Levy’s paintings of the Intifada, though there the
figures are children rather than women. In both the paintings of
male figures, we see them from behind{; this only intensifies the
sense of threat and uncertainty. The women, by contrast, face us -
exposed and vulnerable.
The sites of these events which remain mute and silenced in the
first series, become a dramatic outcry in the second. Here the
setting does not create a sense of space but serves as an
atmospheric frame for the figures that occupy a large part of the
painting. But this frame, like the spaces in the first series, also
bespeaks godforsakenness: the backwaters of the city. The style of
the paintings in this series is explosive, blatant and expressive.
The brushstrokes are freer than in the car paintings.
The painting which links the two series is one which depicts a
gaping hole in a wall leading to an unidentified, dark space in a
forsaken area|. Here the drama is restrained and created by figures
of children painted as graffiti on the wall. Next to the gaping hole
we can see a stain suggesting the shadow of a man. One of the
graffiti figures recalls the English children’s game ‘hangman’. None
of the figures is whole. On the other side of the wall is a child’s
drawing of a house with a path leading to the hole in the wall. The
painting works on the contrast between the world of childhood
reflected in children’s drawings, and the threatening, harsh space
depicted and is suggestive of violence against children.
One atypical painting in the exhibition is “figure in the wind”}- a
man against a background of red corrugated iron. Here the male
figure is not threatening: we have a frontal view of him and can see
that his expression is open and smiling. The background suggests the
gaping spaces of the previous paintings but as opposed to their open
gaps, this surface is closed - perhaps symbolising reparation.
Figure and background are bound together by swipes of paint which,
while they invade the face, do not disturb its expression. A hint of
possible solace?
Daphne Leighton succeeds in articulating threatening distance in a
manner which is expressive but both sophisticated and subtle. The
car paintings evoke in some way the distance and alienation in the
paintings of Edward Hopper. In relation to the cars, it is also
interesting to look at the work of Dirk Skreber, a German artist who
paints toy-like cars from a bird’s-eye view. But what is special in
Daphne Leighton’s paintings is the profound search for the human
beyond the feelings of alienation and emptiness. This is what gives
her paintings their warmth and their poetic qualities.
Orna Millo
Daphne Leighton was born in England in 1945 and has lived in
Jerusalem for many years. She studied English Literature at the
Hebrew University and taught for ten years in the English
Department. Since 1999 she has been studying drawing and painting
with Orna Millo and has furthered her studies of art in Italy and St
Ives, England. In 2002 she took part in a group exhibition in the
“Office in Tel Aviv gallery”.
* Numbers indicate painting in the catalogue.
I am looking down from the studio window at the parking lot and the
garages opposite, at the way the different coloured cars define the
space. I take my camera and wait till the scene seems ‚right’ and
then, with the lens, define it further. Fix it. What makes it right
and right for what? I take a canvas and in the course of the
painting relationships are clarified. But why cars when I do not
even drive? And why do people sometimes walk into the painting when
I have sworn to avoid them? Does the space enclose them or do they
compose the murky ground and the messy buildings?
I had been framing images of corrugated iron, peeling walls, dirty
broken windows for some time before I ever touched paint eight years
ago. And now, when I return to those photos, past and present
coexist and change one another. The unpeopled photos demand human
presence but fail to define who or why, so that I must hunt to find
the image which looks right but only leaves me with further
questions.
Despite many years of teaching English literature and writing
poetry, I do not feel able to put into words the content of my
paintings. In fact, what draws me to paint is its wordlessness: when
I paint my mind is full of questions about colour, composition and
brushstrokes. Perhaps it is this concentration on the materiality of
painting which frees unnamed feelings and thoughts to find their
place on the canvas.
Daphne Leighton |