Alfred Leslie - Bill Delp - Enid Abrahami - Pericles Pappiannis - all 7' x 5' oil on canvas 1996
Biography: Born in New York City October 29. 1927 Alfred Leslie has been exhibiting his paintings and films since 1947. His paintings are in museum and private collections worldwide, and his 1959 film Pull My Daisy is preserved in The National Film Archive.
His most recent filmwork, The Cedar Bar (2002) video 84 minutes, premiered at the London Film Festival in November 2002
an extraordinarAn extroadinary epic of impeccably grafted found footage set to Leslie's early 1950s play, based on actual overheard conversations in the infamous Cedar Bar, denizen and drunken think tank of the most important artists, writers, critics and curators of the day; Willem de Kooning, Clement Greenberg, Barnett Newman et al. Leslie amazingly pitches the soundtrack from the play's staged reading in 1997 against Vaudevillian singing and dancing, noir classics, recent Oscar ceremonies, pornography and the holocaust, drawn from his home video collection. A breathtaking pace is stunningly controlled with vicious psychological intensity and unprecedented impact. Puns compete with an exquisitely complex multi-layering, an uncontainably brilliant juxtaposition of sound, image and text. Simultaneously historical and contemporary it's no less than an insight into that definitive moment when art, buckling under rising commercialism, spiraled outside of its own frames of reference to describe existence itself. Not only a mesmeric and provocative audio-visual trip but a profound commentary on life, art, war, the inadequacy of language and the impossibility of contemporary artistic practice. Pure poetry.
Ian White writing for the London Film Festival 2002
