Lezlie Tilley - Dazzle

LEZLIE TILLEY:  A NARRATIVE OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES

Alas, in this World Nothing lasts Forever
Not even Forever
Even less than Nothing
Is Infinity of Always                                               

Larry Fagin & Ron Padgett[1]

Lezlie Tilley is the ultimate dealer in paradox.  To be in conversation with her is to leap from one idea that is usually diametrically opposed or tangential to another – her inquiring mind entertains every possibility and speaks to the profundity of her practice.  She speaks of the “poetry of infinite possibilities” or “nothing matters – everything matters” and then in the next breath we are dealing with a more quotidian notion such as “sunlight on neatly ploughed fields”.

So visually confronting are the works of Lezlie Tilley that one has the sensation of being blinded by the sun or perhaps one is glimpsing an “Eternity” (read Infinity)  which that trickster poet, Rimbaud, remarked as having “gone away with the sea”[2].  Both the sea and the sun are boundless and so it is with these works of Lezlie Tilley’s which seem to ooze out beyond their square formats filling undefined spaces beyond.  One just cannot turn away in the face of such an endlessness and honesty. 

Here her paintings are constructed around a very simple range of parameters – colour and the grid, but it is in the detail that we find the visual hook where we seemingly cannot focus for any length of time without having to avert our gaze – but we as viewers always come back, such is the power of these works.  Colour for Tilley is a primary concern but rather than adhering to the Albers/Itten formulae she makes her choices more intuitively wishing to create a surface that vibrates with simultaneity creating that slightly unsafe space for the viewer.  She describes some of the smaller works as being “fenced in” or what she has referred to as surrounding them with an electric fence.  Is this to contain that overwhelming charge that these dynamic little works emit?   

As with many post Minimalist works there is no hierarchy.  The works give a sense of wholeness, a visual completeness – they become a Gestalt.  This is not to say that the works are reductively simple, for exactly the opposite is the case.  Tilley describes the grid as not only being central to her work but also as being “like a heart beat” – always there beating out the rhythms of life unconsciously.  She recognises that one “can hang anything from it” and with these works one is not conscious of the fact that in most cases these grids meander slightly giving a sense of weaving in and out of the surface – there are a multitude of happenings within each piece.  For Tilley this moving over and under imitates the way we think in that our thoughts weave in and out of consciousness being sequentially visible and then absent.

For Tilley there is a huge commitment to process and one must acknowledge that embodied within these works is time; time spent alone in the studio; time spent in contemplation.  This is not time seen as an endless continuum but rather I suspect that for Tilley time has its own unique permanence – an always being present in the moment.  Here the hypnotic stasis of a time induced practice becomes transformative finding the viewer bound to intricacy and beauty.  Tilley’s is a permanence that is crucial at the interface with the painting and her lifetime devoted to practice. 

Ultimately one recognises that there is a particular clarity of light emitted by these paintings taking us into an Infinity of Beauty.  This clarity has come throughout history from paintings that we recognise as being made of the Spirit.  It was G.K. Chesterton who wrote that God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.[3]  These paintings of sunlight, clarity and shimmer afford us one such experience, an entry into spirit and infinity – an Infinity of Always.

Patricia Wilson-Adams  2023

[1] Larry Fagin & Ron Padgett were experimental poets associated with the New York School of Painters

Jenni Quilter et al  New York School of Painters and Poets: Neon in Daylight Rizzoli NY  2014 p.222

[2] Rimbaud Selected Verse  translated Oliver Bernard  The Penguin Poets, London & Melbourne, 1962 p.218

[3] G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy first published in 1908