Future Perfect presents Careening Meteorites and the Early Mind, the gallery’s first exhibition with celebrated Australian artist Sam Leach. A painter’s painter, Leach pushes the boundary between representation and abstraction, bringing a contemporary vision face to face with art’s history, and with a deeper, geological past. For his first solo exhibition in Singapore, the artist has produced a new series of paintings, sculptural works based on Paleolithic stone tools, and an accompanying sound piece made in collaboration with musicians Tim Young and Dan Gawler.

In these works Leach revisits the art of the Enlightenment, focusing on the representational codes that accompanied the birth of modern science, the visual dimensions of a new, empirical knowledge. While rooted in 17th- and 18th-century aesthetics, these new paintings are anything but period pieces – instead, Leach’s palette and distinctive painterly style bring pre-modern Dutch influences into direct contact with modernist abstraction. In so doing, they explore how the new, rational way of seeing became an article of modernist faith, surviving even the last century of aesthetic upheaval.

Leach’s canny revisions unsettle our traditional understandings of classical and romantic landscape painting. His recent experiments are marked by measured contrasts: stilled, time-bound creatures inhabit timeless landscapes, beyond the grasp of the present; impervious objects impose an ineffable continuity; abstract, geometrical glitches erupt in perspectival space. Beneath the apparent composure of modern painting lie visions of drastic transformation.

Image: © Sam Leach, Future Perfect