A latent distance in the everyday landscapes of Leonard Koscianski

Leonard Koscianski (1952, Cleveland, Ohio) is an American painter who combines elements of surrealism and American regionalism. His work builds from a twilight, almost nostalgic atmosphere that orbits around vast, rural environments where the apparent tranquility of neighborhoods is covered with a dense layer of unease.

Blue Jay Way, Leonard Koscianski, 2015

Messaging, Leonard Koscianski, 2016

Koscianski's scenes seem to be set in a dreamlike, liminal space where the rules of the real world are suspended. The contrast between natural elements, like immense skies or towering trees, and human constructions, represented by impersonal homes, presents a tremendously powerful scenario where disaster seems to be happening or about to happen.

The position of the artist is posed from a post-dreamlike point, where the need to fill in the details of what was dreamed ends up creating an incongruent, incomprehensible, unsettling landscape.

The Midnight Hour, Leonard Koscianski, 2024

The Green Valley, Leonard Koscianski, 2023

It is this play of repetitions and absences that evokes a game between the visible and the invisible. The distrust generated over the displayed landscape, in turn, creates new distrust about what is being hidden from us, and it is in this duality that we appreciate the echo of figures like Giorgio De Chirico, Edward Hopper, or Grant Wood himself, who germinated this twilight regionalism decades earlier with a work called The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, where for the first time we find this strange scenario in which a young night meets a seemingly artificial light source of unknown origin.

This surrealism becomes more interesting the closer it gets to the border of reality. The scenarios could be understood as models illuminated by a desk lamp if it weren't for the small figures inhabiting them. Something is missing or something is in excess, and something is known to be there but is not seen.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Grant Wood, 1931

A popular professor and lecturer, he has received numerous awards, including the Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bellagio Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives and works in Annapolis, Maryland, where he is a member of the city's Public Art Commission. Thus, Koscianski not only continues the legacy of American rural desolation but also invites reflection on the limits of perception, the emotional impact of what is not revealed, and the fragility of humanity in the face of fierce nature.

Storming In, Leonard Koscianski, 2022

Cloud Illusions, Leonard Koscianski, 2022