Provenance: Private Collection, New York City

ABOUT THE WORK

To understand Leo Valledor’s significance in the American art world is to view him in the context of the modernist mid-century, dominated by arguably the world’s most famous painter at the time, Jackson Pollock. Valledor was at the opposite end of a spectrum dominated by Pollock, the man of the New York School whose gestural abstract expressionism would knock Picasso and the Paris School on its ear. Where Pollock was all raw emotion and intense spontaneity, Valledor was cool, intellectual and deliberate. Pollock embodied the romance of the rugged American West and its cowboys, would routinely be photographed in denims, a cigarette dangling like James Dean from the side of his mouth. Valledor, while a native of California, had parents who had been migrants from the Ilocano north; a father who was a fruit-picker who followed the crops leaving him and his mother who ran card games, to fend for themselves. He was a Filipino-American through and through, although he took the shape of a long-haired mod. He was influenced by the black man’s music, jazz and would name his works after, for example the saxophonist John Coltrane, or musical terms. For Poleka, the GreekMacedonian word for “slowly”, the pace of the piece is both jagged and angular. Both ends have the signature sharp edges of his shaped canvases. A similar work belongs to the collection of the SFMOMA, fitting for the melting-pot city that also deey influenced Valledor and his works. (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)