Leo Valledor was a precisionist, too, a while back. His work is still very simple, but he has become enamored with the brushstroke, and in his new enthusiasm the paint flies to the bottom of these canvases. Except for the framing color the monochromatic paint quality has a good deal of texture deriving from the runniness of the paint and the mark of the brush. A large upright rectangle painted a flat, even, coppery-brass-gold on the edges, about two inches wide, borders a quite juicy yellow center. The yellow has flowed in uneven scalloped patterns that tend to make the surface mosaic pulse and glow. Very possibly this painting was first glazed and revealed elements of the brass, but the surface grew heavier and became too liquid to hold the brush marks. Evidence of the undercoating disappeared, and the paint dried into its liquid form. Another painting in the group consists of a circle with an electric blue edge and a heavy matte black center that retains the brush mark growing upward in arcs and then spattering at the bottom, and generally dried into a gritty mass. The shape of the canvas is one of Valledor’s principal factors: a long curved top contrasting with a tighter curve at the bottom and straight-edged sides making the whole into a fanlike form. The edge is different from the center by virtue of being painted flatly, but only with emulsion—the center being just emulsion, too, but painted and repainted until it has substance, the brush mark becoming a definite radiation pattern describing the tension between the two curves. (If there is anything in the acrylic emulsion it is nothing more than a very small quantity of white.) The result is a nacreous iridescence. Earlier paintings exhibited a year or so ago were gray and waxy, and these, though obviously relatives, have become quite dramatic. I think the more experimental painters are now yielding to painterly impulses; probably the hard-edge and flat surface painters still exercise a statistical hegemony among experimentalists. But the portent of work such as these, and the separation in drying phenomena of various others, may well be the origins of a wave.

—Leo Valledor

— Knute Stiles