'Building Angles' by Leon Aarts. Pastels/crayon on canvas board. c. 2010

Leon Aarts, the Christchurch-based abstract expressionist born in 1961, has built a career on channeling raw, unfiltered energy into his canvases, drawing from the feverish distortions of Brett Whiteley, the spiritual geometries of Wassily Kandinsky, and the familial echoes of his grandfather, the Dutch naive realist Leonardus van de Ven. With over four decades of painting under his belt, Aarts's work often defies neat categorization, blending expressionist fervor with a geometric precision that feels both instinctive and deliberate. His 2010 piece Building Angles (as depicted in the provided image) exemplifies this tension: a compact, framed abstraction that constructs a prismatic labyrinth from interlocking shapes, evoking the precarious architecture of urban sprawl or the fragmented psyche of modern existence. Rendered likely in mixed media, pastel, charcoal, and acrylic on paper, given Aarts's affinity for tactile, layered surfaces, this work measures roughly 8x10 inches, its gilded frame adding a ironic touch of relic-like reverence to what is essentially a chaotic blueprint.

At first glance, Building Angles assaults the eye with a riot of hard-edged geometries, bold triangles, rectangles, and trapezoids stacked and sheared against one another like the skeletal remains of a deconstructed skyline. The composition is radically asymmetrical, with a dominant vertical thrust on the left (a crimson X-form slicing through mustard-yellow slabs) giving way to a more diffused sprawl on the right, where softer, smudged edges dissolve into hazy gradients. This creates a dynamic push-pull: the left side feels aggressively frontal, almost confrontational, while the right recedes into ambiguity, suggesting depth through illusion rather than literal perspective. A single black circle punctuates the lower center like an unblinking eye or a voided rivet, anchoring the frenzy without resolving it, a nod, perhaps, to the existential punctum in Kandinsky's improvisations.

The title itself is a masterstroke of understatement: "building" implies construction, yet the angles here are anything but stable. They teeter on the brink of collapse, with overlapping planes that recall Cubist fragmentation (think Braque's angular dissections) but infused with Aarts's signature expressionist grit. The forms don't cohere into a legible narrative, no obvious buildings emerge, but they hum with latent structure, as if the canvas is a stress test for geometry under emotional duress. This refusal to resolve is the work's greatest strength: it mirrors the artist's own ethos, as he describes himself as "essentially a channel," letting the "coloring of the soul" bleed through without apology.

Aarts wields color like a blunt instrument, deploying a high-contrast palette that prioritizes emotional voltage over harmony. Fiery reds and oranges clash against cool grays and creams, while pops of cadmium yellow inject a feverish optimism— or mania— into the mix. These hues aren't blended seamlessly; they're abraded, feathered, and scumbled, revealing the tooth of the paper beneath and lending the surface a weathered, archaeological quality. The gilded frame amplifies this, framing the chaos as a precious artifact, much like how Aarts's earlier works (e.g., Theatre Reprise, 2009) theatricalize abstraction as performance.

Yet herein lies a subtle critique: the palette, while bold, borders on the bombastic. The yellows verge on Day-Glo shrillness, risking visual fatigue, and the reds can overwhelm the subtler grays, which whisper of shadow and restraint. Aarts's textures, those chalky builds and scraped-back reveals— save the day, grounding the vibrancy in materiality. It's tactile even in reproduction; one imagines the faint grit under fingertips, a far cry from the airless polish of digital abstraction.

Conceptual Depth: Geometry as Psychic Scaffold

Thematically, Building Angles resonates as a meditation on containment and escape. Those interlocking shapes could symbolize the rigid frameworks of society, corporate towers, personal boundaries, buckling under internal pressure, with the black orb as a point of rupture or surveillance. Dated to circa 2010, amid global financial tremors and New Zealand's post-quake anxieties (Christchurch's 2011 devastation loomed large), the work feels prescient: a premonition of fractured stability. Aarts's expressionist roots shine here, transforming geometric abstraction into something visceral, almost bodily, angles as sinew, not just line.

Comparatively, it slots neatly into Aarts's oeuvre, echoing the grid-locked declarations of I AM (2009), where text fractures into urban scripture, but Building Angles strips away figuration for purer form. It's less narrative than his grandfather's naive realism, more unhinged than Mondrian's cool grids (a reference Aarts himself invokes). If there's a flaw, it's in the intimacy: at this scale, the intensity can feel hermetic, demanding prolonged scrutiny to unpack, a virtue for devotees, a barrier for casual viewers.

Overall Assessment

Building Angles is a taut, thrilling exercise in controlled anarchy, Aarts at his most architecturally poetic, proving that even in abstraction, emotion can erect monuments. It earns a solid ★★★★☆ (4/5): deducting a half-star for occasional color overload, but celebrating its formal ingenuity and quiet urgency. For collectors of Kiwi expressionism or fans of geometric soul-baring (Kandinsky meets Whiteley in the Antipodes), it's a gem, raw, resilient, and rigorously alive. If Aarts's passion is "in the air," as he claims, this painting bottles it, angles and all.