Light and Time in Leef and Hodgkin at ERCO, London

Within an architecturally lucid space, Adam Leef’s square watercolors and Howard Hodgkin’s prints face one another across the room or hang side by side, held under overhead light, a phenomenon that gradually alters their surfaces and binds luminosity to temporality. Where Hodgkin’s unbridled, if not riotous, compositions command the wall through concentrated weight, Leef’s watercolors operate as a sequence of patient equanimity—measured and restrained—relying on tonal shifts to draw the eye along the line, from sheet to sheet.

The outdoors has made its way into ERCO’s Dover Street gallery, as a counterpart to the light over nearby Green Park, now cloudy, now sun-dappled. The installation, conceived by Maya Binkin in collaboration with ERCO, is a genuine curatorial invention, even a surprising one. Through the company’s Tunable White system, the fixtures along the ceiling tracks run a brief, repeating cycle that moves the room between cooler and warmer color temperatures.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 division, which confined painting to “the single moment of time” and assigned duration to poetry, is suspended here at the level of perception. [1] Each sheet remains a still, held in moving light. It is the looking that acquires an added duration in Framing Light.

If Lessing insisted on the stillness of the picture, two distinct visual registers produce the illusion of light in Hodgkin’s Springtime and Leef’s English (Hampshire) Suite 28.11.2024. In Hodgkin’s hand-colored print, the window remains a painted construct, an aperture framed by dense, gestural black marks that hold a vivid core of green in place, while the blue sweeps across the frame’s lower edge and spills beyond it. The green bears out Goethe’s observation that color arises where light meets darkness. Whereas Matisse’s French Window at Collioure filled the opening itself with black, Springtime returns that black to the frame, leaving the view to glow.

In Leef’s translucent watercolor, a low band of dark land grounds a wash of blue, and the paper itself becomes the atmosphere. Faint vertical strokes run down the sky where the brush crossed the damp paper. Only the band of land gives up even that impression of translucence: tilted almost imperceptibly, higher at the left, and layered into near-black, the wash becomes matter rather than light. It is here that Leef’s watercolor approaches the density of Hodgkin’s black. Hodgkin builds a room around the sky, while Leef leaves the light in open space.

With blues that shimmer in tonal interplay, this pensive square brings to my mind the small oil seascapes of Lucas Arruda’s Deserto-Modelo series. Yet the Brazilian painter’s pictorial language suggests the hermetic, where horizons seem to trace back to no place at all. Leef arrives at a similar horizon by another route and through a different medium, anchoring each view in time and titling every sheet with the day on which he painted it.

The four-sheet hang approaches provocation, setting the printed multiple beside the single sheet. Hodgkin developed his painterly idiom on wood by painting over the frame, obliterating the boundary between picture and room. On paper, however, it is a different story. In Dark Rainbow and Blue Evening, dense arcs of red, black and blue sit well within the edge of the sheet, one backed by a brushed ochre ground, the other pressed onto bare tan paper. A single gesture recurs across both, and because each impression is colored by hand, no two of the thirty in either edition are alike, rendering each print a variation in its own right. 

To their right, two gray watercolors from Leef’s English (Hampshire) Suite temper the wall with the half-light of an overcast sky. Leef, too, repeats himself, returning to one sky under slightly different weather, each subdued sheet carrying its own sentiment across its horizon. His grays, ranging widely in tone, take on each change in the room’s light.

Three blue sheets from Leef’s English (Hampshire) Suite hang in a row, the same view returned to over two days in late November. From left to right they darken, the pale blue of the first giving way to a sky that has almost closed over the land. Each is a new reading of one horizon, and the dated titles do not prescribe a method for looking: they record, as Hans-Georg Gadamer’s note on understanding reminds me, what happens to perception “over and above our wanting and doing.” [2]

At the National Gallery, a short walk away, Claude Monet’s The Thames below Westminster offers a precedent for this structure, its hazy sky anchored by the dark horizontals of a jetty and a bridge. Monet breaks the river’s light into shifting strokes that carry it across the surface. In Leef’s watercolors the light comes to rest on a single band of land, absorbed into its darkness.