Five days before the exhibition opens, the 12 works which make up A Diasporic Pulse of Faith & Patience are hung in Bergman Gallery. It is the first time that artist Andy Leleisi’uao has seen them all laid out; the first time in many months that he has seen them at all. It is a return to old friends that are intensely familiar and yet seen through fresh eyes.
“They (the paintings) create their own energy,” he says, each work a part of his vision of the way the world could be, a world devoid of the barriers that divide humanity. Leleisi’uao points out his bulb heads iconography, black figures with white circular heads. “They have evolved without me, subconsciously, since then. It’s about looking inside oneself to find out what else can emerge,” he says, a journey where the bulb heads have gone on to float free and then form new bodies of their own.
The exhibition is also the first time that the 12 paintings have been shown together, all works which Leleisi’uao completed last year during his residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City. As the winner of the 26th Annual Wallace Arts Trust Paramount Award in 2017, Leleisi’uao spent four months in New York City for the ISCP residency. The residency programme provided him with time and space to paint, to meet and connect with artists and curators, to visit galleries and museums, and the opportunity to seek out for himself artists of Native American and African American descent.
A Diasporic Pulse of Faith & Patience is influenced by New York City, inspired by the things Leleisi’uao saw every day around him: bike frames locked to lamp posts, a man on a pogo stick, and the people he observed while travelling from his apartment in Bed Stuy to ISCP in Brooklyn. “Every morning I’d catch the subway – it’s a place where people are just trying to make a dollar,” he says of the buskers, commuters and young kids selling snacks who journeyed alongside him each day.
Leleisi’uao’s studio space in New York City largely dictated the number of works in the series; there were three large blank walls which he filled with four canvases per wall, completing all 12 works in an intense five weeks of painting. The residency was a time to work hard and push himself as an artist, Leleisi’uao mentally preparing in the months prior, arriving with the specific intention of evolving his work from 2008 and 2010. When he painted he did so with a sense of freedom. Working on four or so canvases at a time, intuition led him, moving from one adjoining world to the next. “I love that liberty – it’s all about immediacy.”
“Over the course of his residency, Andy had shown me progress images of the works he had produced. I was very taken with them. From that point I was determined to see them at their point of origin,” says Ben Bergman, Director of Bergman Gallery.
It was not the first time Bergman and Leleisi’uao had been in New York City together, their initial visit an exploration and research trip in 2008. This was followed a year later by Leleisi’uao’s solo show Asefeka of the Unmalosa in Chelsea, a further group show, Manuia, in 2010, and the Volta Art Fair in 2011; in all cases Bergman and Leleisi’uao worked together. “Having represented Andy professionally for over a decade this new series of work came to mean a great deal to me as it signified the journey we had embarked on 10 years earlier that sought to link an unlikely modern art destination, Rarotonga, with the summit of pop contemporary art culture in New York,” says Bergman. “It became an affirmation of a platform that we both believe in, to elevate modern Pacific art to a global level.”
On opening night at Bergman Gallery in Rarotonga, Bergman details a sample of Leleisi’uao’s achievements – the 84 solo shows, 147 group shows, the many awards and residencies, and this show, the 20th they have produced together since the first in 2007, Scriptures from the West alongside Cook Islands artist Mahiriki Tangaroa.
“Bergman Gallery has had a huge part in supporting this series of works,” says Leleisi’uao. “It makes a lot of sense that they’re here in Rarotonga. My work belongs here in the Pacific, my works strength comes from location and relevance.”
Francis McWhannell, Curator of the Fletcher Trust Collection, shares his truth of Leleisi’uao’s work in his opening night address, a truth that resonates with all who hear it. “They possess great beauty and wit but are never about superficial prettiness or one liners. His paintings are dense with memorable detail. Spend even a short time looking at them and the figures, objects and scenes he has made lodge themselves in your mind’s eye. They will travel with you as you leave the gallery later tonight and move about the everyday world. Even after many views new details will emerge, sneak up on you. For this reason many visits are recommended.”
McWhannell speaks of how the paintings “point to two key and related concepts underpinning Andy’s work – the fundamental unity of human experience and the importance of acceptance.” It is there in Leleisi’uao’s ever present and evolving distorted figures, his ‘aliens’ which he likens to jellyfish, creatures with no brains, hearts or skeletons which shouldn’t exist but do. “They (the figures) are not deformities – just different,” Leleisi’uao says. “What matters is what’s inside – a diaspora of people – it’s all about trying to get along with each other.”
