War of the World

War of the World

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.

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: first is a physical distance, the object of focus existing in the middle ground, just out of reach of total comprehension; then, light and colour, these forms teeter towards abstraction. Is the structure on the horizon in War of the World an oil rig or a UFO? Pictured at sunset, the sea’s waves are rendered in thick lashings of lemon and tangerine, thinning in texture as the image recedes, as water evaporates. Light on the ocean has been painted as if the strokes emanate directly from the sun. Swathes of orange are dulled by a subtle grey wash that questions their identity—are they clouds or are they smoke?

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