Barry Ledoux

Da Capo, is a musical term meaning from the beginning, literally from the head. When a musician employs this repeat sign in the musical text, there is an implicit relaxing of the musical meter structure, which allows for both slowing of execution and some use of embellishments of the vocal line.

While Music became my first formal instruction in the arts, l did not end up as a musician. Musical interest has remained and has always informed my visual art structures, giving me insight as to how to create a visual equivalent, as in Two Songs for Dowland (Maquette for Two Lead Suits.) These pieces, influenced by the English Renaissance composer John Dowland, were my first mature work. Dowland’s four song books taught me how to texturize the literal meaning of the words by his use of ”word painting”, a musical technique of writing music that reflects the literal meaning of a song.

The subtle thread that seems to weave through my sculptural forms has always been drawing and painting. The body of work exhibited in this show has a sense of line which becomes gesture, that may then circle back on itself to become plane. This uplifting of gesture, including cutting through the page, the use of overlay, and the additional layer of cut shapes below the drawing-paper cuts, pushes these works into an object that is both sculpture and drawing. Their meaning incor- porates oblique references to the body, externally and internally. The picture plane is never a given, it is a material that can incorporate the process of drawing itself. Color is never additive but a true component of form.

Each piece is a distinct entity with different degrees of textural and material inter- est. These transformations through the use of material helped create new interpretations. As a curator once wrote of my work, “T.S. Eliot seized upon it years ago, like John Donne, who could solder together, as it were, science, philosophy and sexuality.” This is the synthesis I hope to achieve in all of my work.