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By incorporating formal abstraction with an intensely controlled handling of the medium, Lecce's paintings exhibit an in-your-face beauty while critiquing a culture's obsessions with the physical ideal, and the restoration and preservation of it.
In a highly controlled studio, Lecce creates polymer emulsions which he manipulates as if they are liquid skins that can be pulled, pushed, blended or isolated to create colorful, playful, yet lush paintings. Elongated silver swirls, candy colored bubble-like shapes and a glossy surface lead to a paradox between the organic and the inorganic. Concentrated bulges of pigment flow into each other until they all mesh and inevitably fall of the edge of the canvasses achieving an unrestrained beauty.
Both vulgarly gorgeous and formally eloquent like an explosion of Pucci couture, Lecce's paintings become abstractions injected with silicone, pumped up and lifted to the limit. At their core, the paintings are preoccupied with beauty in its most true, fragile state, when beauty begins to fade -- beauty at its most powerful. The artist's intention is to preserve, in pure plastic paint, the ephemeral -- beauty slipping away.
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