Inquirer News Service
by Gino Dormiendo
CONTEMPORARY abstract art has found a young, most promising and ardent disciple in the person of Lindslee, a 24-year-old painter from Bacolod City, who has zealously pursued his goal of navigating abstract expressionism with an intense, deeply evocative style that sets his work apart from the predictable and the nondescript.
Lindslee (full name: Lindsey James Alvarez Lee) has impressively chalked up three solo shows, the first having been mounted in 2000 at the Harrison Public Library in New York, where he trained with the city’s Art Students League and affiliated with the Greenwich Art Society.
In the course of his two-year New York stint, he exhibited in various juried shows, where his strikingly spontaneous painting style caught the attention of the highly discriminating chi-chi crowd.
The unassuming, soft-spoken Chinoy artist went on to mount a second show at the Avellana Gallery soon after returning to the Philippines, which, indeed, confirmed his aesthetic potential as a visual poet who speaks in images marked by a rare and truly remarkable dynamism.
Inspired by animals drawn from Pinoy ethnographic sources and those elemental, if lethal, microorganisms, Lindslee once again showed his versatility in both small and large-scale canvases in a recent group show of College of Fine Arts and Design alumni of the venerable University of Santo Tomas at the Art Center.
In the show “Cause and Effect,” (The Drawing Room, until June 4), Lindslee works on acid-free paper, a medium which lends itself to his integrative use of form, color and texture and subsumed by the semiotic conveyance of postmodern chaos. The works expectedly teem with allusions to the nature of causal relationships, the polarities of cause and effect as suggested by the schema of contrasting forms and evoked by disjointed shapes materializing within the work.
The paper works reveal an irresistibly frenetic presence characteristic of the abstract expressionistic fervor enhanced and heightened by seemingly endless doodles and dawdlings, in the manner and tradition of acme painting. The omnipresent gestural touches, through the artist’s spontaneous strokes in pencil and brush, likewise contribute to the unrelieved sense of motion and mutation.
Lindslee has seen it fit to limit his color to the barest earth shades, magisterial in their restraint, thus allowing the central meaning to resonate in, and permeate, the works. With their strong dominant grays and moss-lilac hues, the pieces dramatize the grand moment of immersion, and, more particularly, the artist’s attempt to grapple with the heady effect of stimulation. The result is a brilliant stroke of abstraction, decidedly of a remarkably uncommon perspective.