Leila Al-Yousuf | Waterscapes

5 May - 10 June 2023

Leila Al-Yousuf instinctively draws from an endless spring of shapes and glyphs and the effect is reminiscent of being in the presence of paintings by Etel Adnan or Prunella Clough. In an interview with Bryan Robertson in 1996, Clough said that ‘nothing I do is abstract… I can locate all the ingredients of a painting in the richness of the outside world, the world of perception’. In Leila’s paintings, what first seems wholly abstract are, in fact, intimate depictions of her immediate surroundings. Just as Adnan painted Mount Tamalpais in California and Clough the industrial suburbs across England, Leila’s paintings trace small glimpses of compassion between her and her partner: in ‘Waterscapes’, for instance, their contouring bodies realised in swirling, concentric patterns from layers of oil, watercolour, acrylic and pencil.

In previous paintings, Leila rendered their bodies with more overt definition – but here, the only easily-deciphered anatomy is in ‘3 feet’, where converging toes pierce through windows of colour appearing as if behind shards of stained glass. The surrounding paintings focus through a lens seemingly submerged inside the body. The mark making is reminiscent of cells, capillaries and veins, as if looking through a microscope, leading our eyes down circuitous trails, often shifting course suddenly, or else following a consistent current. In the painting germanely titled ‘Tide’ a cluster of yellow strips as if applied with a quick swoop from her finger nails disrupts a backdrop of undulating waves behind; or, in ‘Yellow energy’, winding tributaries in the same yellow paint surround a whirlpool at the centre. You’ll notice that a scattering of her compositions often lead our eye into these nuclei, as in the unfurling spiral in ‘Continents’ or the wobbly prism in ‘Cascade’.

Leila notes, in a similar vein to Clough, that ‘I’m always responsive to my surroundings’, making the connection between the coalescing bodies with ‘rocks or islands protruding from the sea’. But in her search for what’s at her grasp, Leila repeats, or makes myriad renditions of the same painting; a practice of looking inwardly as well as outwardly. In ‘New vibration’, a second iteration of ‘Vibration’ – which was shown at indigo+madder’s exhibition 'The Place of Complete Surprise’ last year – a vortex of worm-like forms huddle inside an aperture of bristled marks appearing like thin hair follicles. Adnan repeated multiple versions of her beloved Mount Tamalpais, noting that it ‘became my house’. Emily La Barge wrote that Clough’s paintings depicted ‘a world in which forms have undergone some kind of geometric entropy, broken down into their constitutive parts’. Leila’s absorption into painting bodies resoundingly echoes both accounts; she works with a familiar subject that never loses its power to grip, and which she describes in a language that is entirely her own.

Text by Ted Targett

Leila Al-Yousuf (B. 1988, Oxford) lives and works in London. She received a BA Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University in 2010. Solo exhibitions include Inner Quark at TG gallery, Nottingham (2022) and Far Flung Feeling at Asylum studios, Suffolk (2021). Group exhibitions include The Place of Complete Surprise, indigo+madder x The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2022; Your Foot in My Face and Other Tectonic Strategies at Kingsgate Project Space, London (2021) and Mountain of Tongues at Backlit, Nottingham (2018). Leila’s work was featured in the journal 'The Happy Hypocrite: Without Reduction' published by Bookworks in 2021.

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