陈列您的艺术作品给每天无数的访客观看

It’s little more than a truism to say that Sam Leach’s exquisitely rendered paintings of animals are beautiful.

But they’re more than simply beautiful representations of nature – they’re also allusions to what such representations can reveal about our own natures.

Look beneath the dark, lacquered surfaces of these pictures and you’ll see that those noble, life-like creatures inhabiting Leach’s work are often dead – the likely result of human intervention.

This less than beautiful truth isn’t depicted directly – in keeping with the Dutch still-life tradition it references, the subject matter remains in a state of animated suspension, hermetically-sealed in resin, and immune to the threat of decay.

Instead it’s through the repertoire of creatures Leach chooses to display and where he chooses to display them that we glean the truth of what we are looking at. Game animals such as hares and pheasants, conventional symbols of the wealth and abundance of the propertied elite who shot them, an exotic butterfly that looks like a ready-made museum exhibit, a group of monkeys, the favoured subjects of science experiments, inhabit soulless corporate interiors – “spiritual vacuums” in the artist’s terms.

Leach ambiguously juxtaposes his memento moris – traditional reminders of death – with subtle references to the futile desire for immortality that drives “progress” in contemporary capitalist society (itself driven by an obsessive fear of death) to remind us of the duality of such progress: our indiscriminate accumulation of more truth, more knowledge and more wealth has given with the one hand and taken with the other, his paintings suggest.

Beyond simple representations of nature for us to appreciate then, these works are also meditations on the complex ways we are implicated in the natural world and the way we construct ourselves in relation to it. In short, they reveal the paradoxical relationship we have to nature itself: our respect for it and desire to preserve it is suggested by Leach’s careful labour with his subject matter, yet this is intrinsically wedded to the destructive ways in which we intervene in it: the use of animals for decoration and display for example.

These little paintings certainly trade in some big and pressing issues – yet they are not overt political statements or preachy morality tales. Indeed, the remarkable thing about Leach’s work is the refined way the obvious intelligence behind its execution does not diminish its beauty. Like his paintings, the conceptual concerns of this artist are at once considered yet unencumbered. It could be said that Leach’s practice realises the kind of fine calibration you might find in nature.
[written by Carrie Miller]

Kiwa Hirsuta

2007
Oil and Resin on Wood
35cm x 25cm

Insect Loves

des esseintes tortoise

2007
Oil and Resin on Wood
35cm x 25cm

monitored skulls

2007
oil on linen
130cm x 70cm

Albino Wallaby

2007
Oil and Resin on Wood
30cm x 45cm

Monkeys

2007
Oil and Resin on Wood
30cm x 45cm

granite

2007
Oil and Resin on Wood

Footless peacock

2007
oil on linen
130cm x 70cm

peacock

2006
oil on linen
95cm x 135cm