Molly Warnock on Iria Leino

Finnish artist Iria Leino (1932–2022) completed a degree at Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1955 and subsequently relocated to Paris, where she enjoyed a successful career as a fashion model. She moved to New York in 1964 and committed herself to abstract painting: While residing in a loft in SoHo placed her at the center of a burgeoning art scene, she gradually retreated into the privacy of her studio and rarely exhibited her work. This show, the first from the artist’s estate, included nine paintings, predominantly in acrylic on canvas. Produced between 1968 and 1970, when Leino was studying with Larry Poons at the Art Students League, they revealed clear affinities with broader tendencies in North American Color Field painting—not least by eschewing the brush in favor of notionally impersonal methods of application, such as spraying or soak-staining. Yet they also disclosed a determination to keep the hand in play, incorporating freehand drawing in both colored pencil and pastel.   

Putting these seemingly opposed approaches front and center was The Child, 1968. Installed by itself on a wall immediately to the right of the main gallery’s entrance, the painting is clearly scaled to the standing human form at roughly six-and-a-half feet square, like all the works in this show. Vaporous puffs of yellow and orange appear, for the most part, to have been breathed onto the off-white cloth support; only in the lower-left corner do two arcing traces stand out as more emphatic manual spatters. Within the same field, however, looping arm and shoulder gestures produce forms suggesting a bulbous biomorph tethered to the work’s lower edge by two long, stalklike legs in blue and red. At once playful and deliberately gauche, the whole has the air of a greatly enlarged infantine scrawl.  

Something of this zoomed-in quality recurred among the three paintings on an adjacent wall. Eyes Apple, 1968, carries intimations of early Barnett Newman, whereas the mottled color fields of Balloons #4, 1968, and What You Want, 1969, conjure more diffuse bodily metaphors. In both works, delicate pencil tracery seems to anticipate the bolder baroque filigrees one sees in Brice Marden’s later canvases. The barely-there lines, ostensibly sketched on the surfaces prior to the application of color, appear as if beneath painted “skins”; the corporeal connotation is further encouraged by the bruise-like areas of green, blue, and violet against yellow that make up What You Want. 

On the fourth and final wall were three paintings from Leino’s 1968–72 Buddhist Rain series. These works revealed a comparative regularization of drawing as a quasi-meditative practice. In Ruispelto (Rye Field) and Kevainen Lampi (Spring Pond), both 1970, and Sun Rain, 1968, innumerable pastel strokes, none longer than a few inches, have been layered atop glowing, softly variegated grounds primarily in orange, a pink-suffused pale olive green, and crimson, respectively. (Here, as elsewhere, the use of pastel registers as specially attuned to the distinctly powdery appearance of Leino’s acrylic surfaces.) Some of the marks are nearly vertical, while others cross them obliquely, forming a stratified polychromatic mesh in shimmering hues threaded with white and charcoal gray. Leino’s proximity to Poons is manifest both in her high-key palette and in her recourse to a repeating, deliberately elementary pictorial unit: Recall the variously oriented ovals and pointed ellipses of her teacher’s paintings, which were also made around that time. The layering, for its part, evokes oil paintings by Piero Dorazio, an Italian artist whose textural abstractions of the late 1950s and early ’60s similarly feature patiently crafted wefts of colored lines. Yet Leino’s handling, however restrained, admits manifold inflections. The minimal traits are either loosely dispersed or densely crosshatched; they stand out clearly in a serial row or blend almost indiscernibly into the field. Anchoring the infinity of color to the finitude of the hand, they ground contemplation in a distinctly embodied—Molly Warnock