Leonard Greco Brings Viewers to Fairyland

Posted on by Diversions LA

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With work that is always personal, compelling, and rich in both spirituality and narrative story, Leonard Greco is bringing his latest body of work, Fairyland, to MOAH Cedar, in a solo show opening February 23rd and running through March 31st. The show looks to be a grand tour de force: epic, slightly surreal, and intensely powerful.

Greco describes this upcoming bravura exhibition as having “a definite camp sensibility, not dissimilar to the theatrical confections of Cecil Beaton in the 1920’s.  Camp, having been described as the lie that tells the truth, is an innate language I have been reticent to explore until recently.”

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He says that the immersive exhibition will be touching on “the weighty tableau of the Temptation of St. Anthony of the Desert and the perilous trials of Herakles.  My aesthetic expression is influenced by my instinctive inclination to lighten somber, somewhat ponderous existential themes with a gay touch.” Greco adds that he is consciously using the word “gay” in two ways, both in its “current identity-laden fraught understanding, and the anachronistic yet more delightful sense.  Perhaps internalized homophobia has previously left me hesitant to make work so boldly queer – in every sense of the word – yet making art so openly flamboyant has been liberating.”

Greco St Anthony

A recently completed figure for the exhibition, his six-legged Pluton, Prince of Fire and Governor of the Region in Flames, is an embodiment of this new work, a vibrant depiction of one of “a cadre of tempters” that will be a part of a major piece in Fairyland, “Embodied: St. Anthony & the Desert of Tears.” Brilliantly colorful, rich in detail, it is a large-scale work that’s alive and dimensional. And as with each of the works in this show, in it Greco continues to draw from a wide range of resources, mythology, Catholicism, British folklore, and the operas of Wagner.

He says that the work presented at Fairyland are shaped by “familiar themes, explored many times over by countless artists; yet this time reimagined through a prism of my own.”

Greco Fairyland

The exhibition is at once whimsical, witty, and spectacular – or as Greco says, “it is my intention to create a theatrical spectacle that is peculiar, visually arresting and deeply personal.  Although the work is made solely for my own delight, I hope others find the work meaningful in some way.” With his painstaking creative process in mind and the density of these works, Greco is hopeful that visitors will resist what he terms “the siren call of selfies” to take it all in and absorb its drama and dynamics.

Asked to describe his aesthetic overall, Greco asserts that “it is never ironic, as is so often the current fashion.” He finds irony cynical and mocking, whereas his wit and humor is far kinder in its expression.  “My work is never cynical for no other reason than the inherent affection I hold for my motley crew of heroes, saints, and sinners,” he explains.

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Asked about his strong ties to Catholicism as both inspiration and redefinition in his work – and his mixed feelings about its mythology, he says “There are moments in the studio when I hesitate adding yet one more cross to a piece or stitching the Corpus to a crucifix. Catholicism is a touchy subject for a great many people and I can empathize with their ambivalence, and frequently their out-and-out pain.”

According to the artist “For me, the Church and her saints have been a life-long refuge, a place of art, beauty,  ritual and faith, a place of rest from a chaotic, frequently violent childhood to the present, with the quotidian angst of living in an overextended and distracted age.”

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Greco adds “I feel the questions the early Church Fathers first grappled with in the 3rd and 4th century are still weighty, still relevant, and still unresolved to this day.  How do we as a people, given life, live it fully and truly, steadfastly avoiding the distractions and temptations of a chattering world seemingly hellbent upon inane conformity?”

He relates that he is deeply interested in the “seemingly insignificant distractions that prevent us from embodying our truest selves. In essence, what interferes with your being authentic? What is your demon? Who, what, shadows your path?”

The dichotomy between his own devotion to the church and its frequent intolerances is not lost on Greco.

“As a gay man infatuated with the Roman Church, one  that has been historically hostile and intolerant to LGBTQ people – and to other folks, I’ve had to re-contextualize narratives to suit my own perspective. But isn’t that what art making is meant to do?” he asks, noting that art is always “the retelling of stories in new and personal ways.”

Describing the mythological aspects of his art-making, he says that “like humanists in the past, I feel a kinship to our storytelling ancestors. I’m just spinning the yarn a little further.”

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And in some cases, he is almost literally spinning it – his work with fabric is unique and filled with brilliant colors and design elements, although his stuffed paintings are hardly the only aspect of his work. From intricate embroidery floss to acrylic on canvas, Greco weaves a storytelling spell with his art.

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“I draw, that I think is my strength. Whether with a pencil or ink, or brush or needle, I draw. It is my greatest love. While Fairyland has an absence of actual drawings on paper, the works are drawn with paint and thread. After Fairyland closes, I intend to retire the needle and thread for a bit and focus on putting pencil to paper for awhile. But I’m certain the call of the sewing basket will beckon me back.”

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Overall, Greco has been working as a fine artist and decorative painter and muralist for more than 25-years, creating a body of work that is highly detailed and truly riveting in terms of texture, context, and yes, story. “While my commercial and artistic practices are separate entities, they’re also connected,” he says. He calls his work an exploration of the “extremes of human existence” presented through archetypal figures that are undergoing transformation and salvation, rebirth, and entlightenment.  He creates these figures in an illustrative, narrative, and realistic style with backgrounds that may lean toward expressive abstraction. Overall, he explains “I am searching to find the divine in the everyday, to show that all life, in all its incarnations is indeed sacred and beautiful.”  

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With that journey in mind, step into Greco’s Fairyland for a view of exuberant redemption, sacrifice, loss, and passion. Join the artist on a spiritual trip that takes viewers into a magical realm where religion, fantasy, and wonder shape their own world.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

Leonard Greco: Out of the Boondocks

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Artist Leonard Greco is something special. A decorative muralist and painter for over 25 years, Greco also have his own blog, https://boondocksbabylon.com, which tells the story behind his works and inspiration for same. His paintings are powerful, haunting, often including religious or mythic imagery in settings that evoke surreal icons. In short, his work is like nothing you’ve ever seen before, fusing generations of disparate cultures and art. Along with his paintings, drawings, prints, and puppet figures make up Greco’s full oeuvre.

The work is startling and compelling, both in its use of color and its story telling style. Greco says he is exploring narrative figurative painting, frequently using archetypal figures. He also has a secondary objective: “to explore the extremes of human existence, most notably birth and death.”

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He has other themes that appear throughout his works as well, of transformation, salvation, and re-birth. Drawn to the narratives of early peoples, he’s inspired by the Mayan creation myth and Popol Vuh’s tales of the Hero Twins Hunahpú and Xbalanqué. This Meso-American mythos is restructured and reflected through the artist’s own experiences and interests in the Italian Renaissance and Roman Catholic saints, the surrealism of English-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington, and Ghosticism, among others. Greco’s own dreams prove an equally compelling landscape from which the artist draws.

His love of narrative depictions in the midst of these varied influences takes on universal themes, and a universal visual vocabulary, which the self-taught artist describes as “Life and death, mortality, morality, and most importantly, inner knowledge, gnosis.”

The artist’s narrative is also intensely personal, so that the refined surrealist images also take on an aspect of reality – real life as observed through the prism of a dream.

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Greco’s “Jonah,” oil on panel, is a dark, surging, seething painting, with the green whale against whom Jonah triumphs floating in a turbulent grey sea. The whale has a head disproportionately huge – and human. A God-like head parallels the whale’s, looking down from the sky. A turreted bridge is in the background; a strange monument on which Jonah stands, a pedestal with the name Jonah upon it, in the foreground. Dark but translucent beams of light spill down from the sky. Jonah, his body blue, his face masked, looks up toward God, his hand pointing to the whale. This Jonah, unlike earlier painted incarnations such as those by Pieter Lastman, or Frederik van Valkenborch, is no pale creature fleeing the monsters jaws. He is no circumspectly robed elderly prophet, praying as he emerges in Jan Brueghel’s stormy sea.

No, this Jonah has emerged with his own strength. Jonah may have spent three days and nights in the belly of the beast, swallowed by both the whale and his futile attempt to avoid a mission from above, but the experience has not broken him. The Jonah Greco depicts may not have seen the error of his ways, may have fought his own way from the beast rather than being saved by an act of God. Is Jonah’s mask an attempt to still flee God’s will? In this raw and tumultuous world, Jonah’s figure is powerful, even if his face and motives remain hidden.

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Deeply visceral is “Self Portrait of the Artist as a Flea,” a recent pencil and watercolor on paper, a paper doll of sorts that can be made to move through the judicious use of brads and string. Drawn in lavender, yellow, and white, it is the artist’s head on the body of a flea, but one which features abundant frontal nudity – except when covered by the artist with a ripe green fig leaf to render the work acceptable to social media. There is so much to be said about this piece, which in Greco’s words uses nudity and the body of a flea both unabashedly against “the bigots and the nasty folks who hate us, particularly important after the Orlando massacre. Queers have been treated like vermin for so very long, by fashioning myself as a flea I embrace what they find so vile.” The work has the quality of a fairy tale image, in part due to the colors chosen, in part due to the anthropomorphic flea, whose head shape resembles a jester’s hat. The fast, tiny, hard to destroy flea, a creature which though reviled, remains hardy, one who has been made to dance, to leap, to claim it’s own “flea-ness,” seems a triumphant image, as well as a humorous one. It’s a recognition of self, an acceptance, a dare to the world to accept, too. There is both anger and joy in that flea, and pride, in its careful, detailed rendering.

Greco Uranus

The artist’s 2015 watercolor on paper, “The Castration of Uranus” depicts the rather brutal outcome of son Titan Cronus’ attack with a stone sickle on his brute of a father. Greco uses this image to translate his own rage and inability to perform such an act on his own cruel father. In the painting, the green, monstrous beast-man, complete with images of the siblings he devoured in his distended belly, is castrated by his pale and sinewy son, blood pouring in a muscular wound from the gaping hole in Uranus’ genitalia. A pale woman, the moon behind her head, stands in blank observation. The twinning of the myth and Greco’s own experience creates a painting that is as alive as it is apocryphal. Particularly compelling is the vitality in Titan Cronus’ muscles, his life gained, his body about to spring forward into a future with fear vanquished.

Each of these works is a reimagining – of a Biblical story, a Greek myth, family violence, societal roles and values. Seamlessly blending the surreal here, the underlying narrative story there, adding brush strokes of irony and wisdom to his perfectly detailed images, Greco writes a new kind of artistic story, which like that self-portrait as a flea, itself contains joy and anger, pathos and triumph. The stakes are high, the world is strange. And art and artist go on.

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Greco recently exhibited at the 2016 Second Annual Mask Art Show in Venice, but has shown throughout the Southland. Until a new show is announced, follow the artist’s blog for a look into his art and his mind.