Mountain House

Mountain House

Saskia Leek is known for plucking inspiration from the faded prints and amateur paintings that languish in second-hand stores, gathering dust. She adapts the kitsch subject matter of paint-by-number kits—the quotidian calendar highlight reel of horses, domestic interiors and mountains. She takes these templates and recreates, abstracts and represents them in a way that is always vaguely familiar yet somehow off-kilter.

Leek’s paintings are exercises in subterfuge. Generally small in size and painted on board, Leek’s works repurpose imagery that is essentially stock to the Western canon. Often, the artist presents her subject matter at a distance. Firstly, there is physical distance: the object of focus exists in the middle ground, just out of reach of total comprehension. Then, through light and colour, these forms teeter towards abstraction.

The cabin in Mountain House offers a warm refuge from the chalky greys and blues of snow and sky, safe from the acidic yellow flash that punctuates the composition's centre. This streak is reminiscent of the backscattering phenomenon, in which air particles show up under flash photography—which had once been thought to indicate the presence of ghosts. The watery white wash gives the impression that we are staring through a gauze curtain, happening upon something we aren't supposed to see.

Leek toys with the conventions of representation in her intensely quiet imagery, creating objects of contemplation and melancholy, even dread. She reproduces images we could know, but cloaked in an increasingly abstract style, populated by chance and happenstance. Their familiarity calms us as we find moments of the otherworldly in the repetition of the banal.

— Maya Love, 2022