Border Crossings Magazine Spotlight: Leopold Plotek

 

It is possible that at 60 Leopold Plotek may be the most daring and masterfully complex painter in North America. He is also one of the least publicly acknowledged. The product of this disconnect between achievement and profile could be viewed at Han Art, where a retrospective assortment of 13 canvases overfilled the diminutive space, beautifully and forcefully suggesting the necessity of a major museum overview of Plotek’s work. 

 

In the early 1970s, after studying at the Slade School of Fine Art—a residence that marks his current work in its relation to a number of London painters including Walter Sickert, Roger Hilton and Leon Kossoff—P1otek returned to Montreal where he developed unique, large-scale abstractions. The work of this period exhibits a formalism that maintains a balance in architectural and psycho- logical space. 

 

Roald Nasgaard refers to Plotek as the “odd man out” in the 1979 “6 Propositions” exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts because, Nasgaard says, “He did not lose faith in the traditional painting space as a vehicle for imagistic and narrative content.” In fact, his Malevich-tinged work of the period resembles less “the indeterminate state of painting in the late ’70s” (as Lucie Dorais put it in the pages of  Arts Canada) than a kind of harbinger of our current brand of “new abstraction.” Plotek’s impure, shadowed and modelled spaces prefigure the practice of any number of contemporary abstract painters. When Ken Johnson in The New York Times admires Tomma Abts’s recent work for it’s “mysterious, inscrutable sense of purpose” or when the Turner Prize judges speak about extending the language of abstraction with “a kind of depth and illusion . . . which you normally find in figure painting,” they might be speaking about Plotek’s early achievement. 

 

By not recognizing the distinction between abstraction and representation, Plotek worked toward an intuitive mode of depiction that went against the visual ideals that his Montreal-based teachers, among them Yves Gaucher and Roy Kiyooka, inherited from the post-war battles over abstractions legitimacy. “The ideology of pure visuality is an intellectual construction,” he said recently. “There is no such thing as ‘the innocent eye.’ Seeing invokes the entire cognitive structure of the mind.”