Of Muck and Mind: Ron Leax and the Flatworks
D. B. Dowd

There are no easels in Ron Leax’s studio. His flatworks not only are flat, they lie flat as the artist works on them. The image brings to mind a sort of table-top Pollock. And Leax does produce works which qualify in an arch sort of way as action paintings. A ground is prepared. Materials are loosed upon it. In bumper-sticker parlance, shit happens….

From a Leaxian perspective, the investigation of a material is calculatedly empirical. Suspensions, solvents, salts: what do they do? How do they act upon each other? There is ‘art’ here, in the normative sense of the term; certain formal flourishes we associate with Abstract Expressionism may be glimpsed in Leax’s flatworks. But home-made chemistry, backyard biology, and experiential physics win the day. Quite literally, something else is going on. What?

Leax has spoken of his interest in phase transition states, a concept which refers to the mounting instability of a material on its way from one phase to another, like water near the boiling point. He sees such states as compellingly uncertain. Things could go either way: a transformation might occur, but so might a collapse. These in-between charged transition states create what Leax has called ‘a potency.’