“As the World Turns” is an apt title for Leigh Salgado’s fourth solo exhibition at Launch Gallery. Many of the graceful works are circular, globe-like. A lush world of beauty that also evokes ideas of the circular nature of life: our annual passage around the sun, and speaks to the power of female strength in nature.
The painted, collaged, and cut-paper works are intricately mandala-like. The layers of each hand-cut paper and acrylic piece are as delicate as butterfly wings held in place by tough yet fragile spider webs.
Leigh Salgado, In & Out, 2021
Creating almost impossibly perfect patterns in medium and palette, Salgado juxtaposes the transitory nature of life and its abiding existence, and both the poignancy and power of its beauty.
Her lacy patterns are sensual and tactile, with painted elements varied in each piece. In Secret Garden, her work is almost like stained-glass, rich and deep. Be Still My Heart is more of a mosaic, with its image of an actual heart blossoming like a flower. And speaking of flowers, Heartbreaker makes muted blossoms grow around the image of a woman’s lingerie; the darker, more muted palette seems like an elegy for a femme fatale who has cast that role away. In and Out carries an autumnal color palette and reveals broken handcuffs, once again calling to mind the idea of a role or a relationship cast aside.
Leigh Salgado, Ballgown, 2021
Ballgown, with a golden background and a dress seemingly made of bubbles, appears to burst the fairy-tale-princess myth into something that doesn’t last, a temporary dream at best.
Leigh Salgado, Red, 2021
Launch Gallery,
ends November 13.