Lluís Lleó (1961) Spain/USA Lluís Lleó comes from a family of painters. His great-grandfather, Joan, was a decorative painter who did ceilings in the old houses of Barcelona: “Clouds, Little angels, provincial Tiepolo – rich people used to love that kind of stuff.” His grandfather, Lluís, was a watercolorist who designed advertisements and posters, including some effective propaganda-posters for the Republican side of the Civil War. His father, Joan Lleó, who is still very much alive and working, is a painter whose work mediates between abstraction and figuration, a trait he bequeathed to his son. A self-taught artist, Lluís grew up in a family of painters and artisans in Barcelona, and early on experienced the familial and cultural traditions of art. Throughout his childhood, Lluís visited the rural churches of Catalunya and Vall de Boi, where he became smitten by the beautiful economy of medieval frescos. Having studied Renaissance architecture and the artistry of fresco, he turned to painting, then to sculpture, but has continually looked to drawing as the blueprint for his allover practice. Ideas are tested, refined, and transferred right away into drawing. Lluís vividly recalls how his father, who earned a living mainly as a teacher at the Fine Art School, sat him down to talk about his putative art education. “He said, ‘Lluís, if you don’t know how to paint already at your age (I was then 18) you are never going to learn anyway.’ He was always very frustrated with his students. They would arrive at 18 and know nothing about painting. He believed they should know a lot already, otherwise there was no point in trying to be artist”. He is 50 now, and spent most of his life in Barcelona; since 1989 he has lived and worked in New York. “I think really coming to New York was my beginning as a professional painter,” he now thinks – a common feeling among artist who, early in their careers, made it from the “provinces” to New York. No matter how much cultural energy a city may put out, there is always a feeling of inequality: not as severe as it used to be in 17th century Rome, 19th – century Paris or 1960s-70s New York, but still perceptible and felt by any intelligent, expatriate artist. What goes on in his pictures? They are, in a general way, abstract: which is to say, they don’t exactly look like pictures of real things out in the world, a wall, a figure, a stone. And yet they don’t exactly look like things not in the world. They are both delicate and ephemeral- seeming, and yet rather intensely concrete, strongly physical. (parts from essays by Joanna Kleinberg, Assistant Curator at The Drawing Center, and Robert Hughes, an art critic, writer and television documentary maker)