VICE MAGAZINE: LERONE IN HIS “ANCESTRAL HIVE”
by Maggie Shannon
ABOUT LeRone Wilson
A sculptor and painter living and working in New York, Lerone Wilson’s primary medium is beeswax, the oldest form of painting, used by the ancient Kemetic people to create art, among other things. His sculpted encaustic paintings explore the complexities of the historical and cultural inferences of spirituality, history, and identity. A finalist for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and winner of Best in Show for the Carroll Harris Sims Award, Wilson has shown in galleries around the country, including Bill Hodges, Rush Arts, Kim Foster, Boccara Art, White Box and G.R. N'Namdi in New York and Chicago; the Scope Art Fair Miami; Cutlog Art Fair, New York; and SPRING/BREAK Art Show. He won the 2011 Bombay Sapphire Artisan Award, given during Art Basel Miami week, beating out 4,000 artists from across the country. In 2019, he was featured in the Special Projects section of Art New York and invited to participate in the Pierce and Hill Harper Foundation Artist Residency in Detroit. He was part of the 2020 Uptown Triennial at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery and the Black Lives Matter street mural he curated is included in a current exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum, Designing Peace: Building a Better Future Now, on view through August 2023. Wilson’s works have also appeared in live auctions and show at Phillips DePury and in museum shows, including the Museum of Biblical Art in New York and the African American Museum in Dallas, and are in several important corporate and private collections across the world.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My Work represents a medley of different textures that stimulate the senses, making the art not just a thing of beauty to be admired from a distance, but something we can feel connected to through the expression of touch. It’s a way of revealing an image without actually being able to control it, letting it come about itself.
The work varies in shapes with 1 to 4 inches of wax built up on the surface. Their elegant abstract details invoke minimalist historical references that are surprisingly compelling. The results are unrecognizable surfaces that encourage kind of curiosity as to their function as paintings.
Minimalism can be defined as the perfection that an artifact achieves when it is no longer possible to improve it by subtraction. This is the quality I want to achieve with the texture of the encaustic. Every component, every detail and every function has been reduced or condensed to the essential. The simplicity of my work explores the possibility of working creatively without disrupting the purity of the material.
Jason Schmidt, New York Magazine
PROCESS
“I create my work by first melting a mixture of beeswax, carnauba wax, resin and powder pigment, which I then make all 1 solvent. I apply, to the panel with an assortment of palette knives to build up the surface then fuse each layer with heat. After the wax is completely hardened, I use carving tools that I created to make specific patterns into the wax. The process is very physical, time consuming and extremely detailed. The result is a minimal, translucent and highly texturized surface that fully engages all of the senses.”
—LeRone Wilson