LEO VALLEDOR

May 1 – 8, 2018
Proposed and curated by Lara Pan

WhiteBox is pleased to announce the upcoming presentation, Leo Valledor: Color As Space, a solo presentation of the artist’s work as part of the Frieze New York art fair 2018 VIP program, organized in collaboration with David Richard Gallery. Leo Valledor (1936-1989), originally from San Francisco, was a founding member of Park Place Gallery in Lower Manhattan in the 1960s. He explored shaped canvases, reductive color palettes and multi-component canvases to create the illusion of three-dimensional shapes in a two-dimensional picture plane.

Color As Space explores Valledor’s interest in using bold colors with curvilinear and circular shapes to explore space in the two-dimensional picture plane. The paintings in this presentation are all from the 1980s, primarily single-panel compositions of moderate to smaller size. Though Valledor is known for much larger and multi-component compositions, it is illuminating to see how he successfully applied torque and created tension on a moderate scale to explore three-dimensional space while confined to a two-dimensional plane.

Though Valledor was known for his hard edge painting, curvilinear shapes and circles were also an important part of his visual vocabulary. They are less confining shapes and push the limits of his compositions, bringing a plasticity to his work and a metaphor for unbounded space. They allow the viewer’s eye to move around freely and flow outside of the fixed confines of a conventional picture plane. Curvilinear and circular shapes became another one of Valledor’s many tools in his kit of economical means, along with color and shaped canvases, for exploring an expansive topic such as space and cueing viewers to look beyond the literalness of his compositions and see another world beyond. The viewer is encouraged to challenge visual perception and use their imagination.

About Leo Valledor:

Leo Valledor (1935-1989), a Filipino American artist, grew up in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, studied Abstract Expressionism at the California School of Fine Arts (currently, San Francisco Art Institute), and was part of the “Beat” scene—the cross cultural and dynamic fusion of visual art, jazz music and poetry. His first exhibition was the same year and location of Alan Ginsberg’s first public reading of his poem, Howl.

In 1961 he moved to New York and in 1962 was a founding member of the Park Place Group, an artist collective and exhibition venue for experimental art in Lower Manhattan. The group formed to explore their mutual interest in literal and illusory space, music, and social concerns. In New York, Valledor’s new minimalist tendencies were appreciated by and exhibited with Sol Le Witt, Robert Smithson, Ed Ruda, Mark di Suvero, Peter Forakis and Tamara Melcher, among others. In 1968, Valledor returned to San Francisco where he continued to explore his unique abstract painting that extended musical harmonies and rhythms to shaped canvases and colors.

This exhibition made possible thanks to the generous support of David Richard Gallery and Artworks Advisory.