One Work: Leslye Villaseñor
Entre Luz y Sombras, Sombra 2, 2019, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.
[Image description: A photo-realist painting of a dark doorway, illuminated only slightly by light coming in through a window out of frame.]
Leslye Villaseñor and I both love horror movies. This fact always surprises people, probably because of our temperaments—we’re both quiet, gentle, outwardly calm. But we’ve been avid horror fans for years. When Leslye was growing up, her father would tape movies from television and built up an impressive collection on VHS, which he would encourage his daughter to explore.
Leslye and I agree that it’s not the flamboyant, gory horror that is the genre’s best, but rather the more restrained films. The ones that simmer with dread, infused with an abstract mood of deep dis-ease, and only mere flashes of explicit pain. There is pleasure in waiting for your inchoate fear to appear on the screen, something amorphous congealing into a monster, a ghost, a bad guy, which then punctures the balloon of anticipation that has been growing into a tensile orb inside you. Pop, the pressure gone.
This all, I think, explains why I am so taken by her painting Entre Luz y Sombras, Sombra 2, which I spotted stacked with other paintings against the wall on a recent studio visit. It’s a few years old, from 2019, with a markedly different air than her more recent work, which prominently features figures and probes the vicissitudes of memory. This painting, however, isn’t so much about memory as it is about the here and now. It’s a simple image, really—light streaming in from some out-of-frame window to illuminate a shadowy doorway. It’s a photorealist work, Leslye’s painterly virtuosity on full view, and the scene does indeed feel eerily real. I find there to be something fundamentally unsettling about the image. The window’s bars project a sense of entrapment. The tile gleams with a cold sterility. And what could be lurking in the pitch-black space behind the door? Waiting? Waiting for me, for reasons that can’t be good. It’s a moment stopped in time, the unknown frozen in nowness. I stare, expectant, wishing for whatever it is to swiftly reveal itself. To diffuse the pressure. But in the disquiet, I feel particularly alive.
Our love of horror films (and, in this case, paintings) might mean that Leslye and I are, in fact, particularly evolved. As horror scholar and researcher Mathias Clasen has explained,
“Presumably, we evolved to find pleasure in threat simulation because of the learning potential of such simulation. When we play with fear, we may learn important lessons about the dangers of the world as well as our own responses to danger. We learn what it feels like to be afraid, and we get to practice and hone fear-regulation strategies. We may even become more resilient in the process.” [1]
Yes, that’s what Leslye and I are doing. Learning. Playing. Regulating. Becoming more resilient. Turning to art to face fear and find pleasure in a world with so many very real monsters.
—Elizabeth Rooklidge, Founder and Editor, HereIn
Note
Mathias Clasen, “On the Psychology of Horror Movies,” Psychology Today, October 13, 2021