Veronica Leiton's Universal Lansdcape

As a visual artist, Veronica Leiton interrogates the creation of a larger universe out of numerous and overlapping micro-worlds. She deploys a disarming simplicity of images, such as ladders that simultaneously connect and separate distinct spatial planes, to illustrate a complex connectivity linking human to non-human worlds, oceans to landscapes, the physical and the spiritual. Originally from Chile, Ms. Leiton has lived in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez for the last eleven years.

The force of Leiton’s work emanates from the rich combination of techniques and themes she develops through the process of painting itself. Using a variety of materials such as oils, watercolors, inks and acrylics, Leiton produces a series of contrasts that at once attract and repel, electrify and tranquilize within the same canvas. In her recent paintings Leiton superimposes and layers images and media to create multiple depths of field. The effect is a complex interweaving of simple elements that challenge the concepts of linear time and segregated space. Leiton’s great love is color and she forcefully uses contrasting colors to create convergence and unity, to compose areas of visual counterpoint.

Landscapes dominate Leiton’s paintings. It has been said that landscapes are the projection of a state of mind. From a serene blue that provides the backdrop of a submerged city to the apocalyptic reds and ochres of desert spaces Leiton’s landscapes are an expression of visual as well as spiritual and conceptual energy.

These landscapes are haunted by images from Leiton’s imagination. Again and again we see disintegrated cities, ladders, and the white and silent moon. It is this very repetition of symbols across spatial planes that structures Leiton’s work. She pushes notions of classical symmetry by interweaving icons and images not merely across the painting’s surface but between its’ textures and multiple layers. A painting’s upper layers are reflected in its’ lower ones, while the cliffs and crags that define the canvas’ left become a submerged urban landscape on the right. We come face to face with the sign and its’ equivalent in a reflection that self-reflexively revolves about itself.

This fragmentation and play between spatial planes in Leiton’s work can also be interpreted in various ways. From the perspective of the painting as compositional text—wherein picture planes emerge like sedimentary layers, superimposing themselves one upon the other, to enrich both the sign and the signifier—to a brief snippet of painted light which reaffirms both the external world and the world contained within the space of the painting. Leiton’s painterly abilities show us the existence of more than one plane of being. From the threshold of another universe that we access by climbing Leiton’s ladder-bridge we descend into our very own deepest waters. This is the slipperiness of a landscape that is aware of itself as perception and creation.

The elements that shape Leiton’s landscapes make, unmake and remake images of the world. They are the reconstruction of a meditation: fragments of life upon the horizon.

—Rosario Sanmiguel

Translation: Melissa Wright & Laura Burns