LEONARD BABY
L.A., Baby
Artist Reception: April 7th, 6-8 PM
April 7th - May 11th, 2024
Leonard Baby’s new exhibition is about “dress codes," a term which itself has the perfume of the anachronistic. In 1866, Manet painted The Fifer, a young boy in formal military dress playing the flute. To look at him now, he could be modeling for a Bode campaign. But even then such cosplaying allowed people from any station to homogenize under the sheen of uniformity. Balthus often depicted girls in school uniforms as though their attire could be equated with some morality borne from socialization. In our times, the utilitarian aspects of specified dress are largely missing amongst the population with projections of former practical usage masquerading as personality traits vis-à-vis fashion.
Of course, our conversation here regarding fashion leans heavily on color and its implication. So, the red of the cheerleaders’ uniforms carry the weight of red in any painting (love, passion, royalty) but also possesses the implications of red in sports (aggression, intimidation, domination). The title of the piece, Sacred Hearts, emphasizes this dichotomy. "It’s like a shallow, valentine-y, high-school-feeling pair of words, but it bears the burden of the grandiose and horror of the Catholic faith. Similarly, the figures in white, particularly the girl on the operating table and the women in the jail courtyard; white meaning purity and peace in art history, but, inhabiting an institutional sterility in these contexts. White being a marker of sin, or sickness rather than chastity."
The new show L.A., Baby includes one painting of a figure taking off his pants. Leonard has a companion piece still in progress of a man in a Speedo meant to further highlight the theme of dress code depending upon the circumstances. Underwear in one setting becomes sportswear in another. Painter Danielle Orchard often employs doubling of such kind in her paintings: a botanical book sitting on a coffee table is open to a page on parrot tulips while out the window we see the actual flowers in the garden.
Cinema is another major influence on Leonard Baby, particularly mid-century and foreign films. Whether it's an intentional commentary, or a sign of the times, Michelangelo Antonioni or Ingmar Bergman often place their well dressed characters against a rough and brutally organic landscape, as if they wore Gucci to go camping. The painting This Fashion I Learn echoes this sentiment, utilizing a composition from the underground Terrence Stamp classic Teorema.
This thread is also made evident in Alive in the Light on Monday where pigs hover around parked cars as two spectators look on. The pastoral dress of the onlookers implies an innocence and a sense of tradition or propriety. On other works, Leonard elaborates “the brilliance of the bullfighting uniform in a scene of animal cruelty, or the sweetness of the little girls’ apron and plaid skirt in a scene of child labor; this kind of contrast amuses me."
Matisse often used to dress up to go into the studio cementing his endeavor as an aesthetic experience where he presented himself to the canvas and so should be dressed accordingly to do so.
“I wanted this body of work to feel expansive,” continues Leonard “I wanted to pull from disparate scenarios: a therapist's office, a hospital, a dining room, a farm, an arena, a jail, and ponder what we deem appropriate when inhabiting these locations.”
Cropping is context as much as any setting and inherently linked to fashion. A crop top and a close up both benefit from what’s missing, a lack of fabric or extraneous visual information reveal something else about the intention of the maker or wearer. The severity of a Thom Browne shrunken suit is rivaled by the zoom in on a set of hands without a face. It’s a commitment to focus, a directive, or in fashion terms what someone might call “a statement piece.”