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 is constructed from a twilight atmosphere, almost nostalgic, that orbits around broad, rural environments where the apparent tranquility of the neighborhoods is covered by a dense layer of unease.

Blue Jay Way, Leonard Koscianski, 2015

Messaging, Leonard Koscianski, 2016

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

The artist's position is set from a post-dreamlike point, where the need to fill in the details of the dreamed gaps ultimately presents an incongruent, incomprehensible, unsettling landscape.

The Midnight Hour, Leonard Koscianski, 2024

The Green Valley, Leonard Koscianski, 2023

Thus, this play of repetitions and absences evokes a game between the visible and the invisible. The distrust generated about the shown landscape in turn generates a new distrust about what is being hidden from us, and it is in this duality where 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 we first find this strange scenario where a young night meets a seemingly artificial and unknown source of light.

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

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Grant Wood, 1931

A popular professor and lecturer, he has received numerous awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Residency. 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 unrevealed, and the fragility of the human against the fierce nature.

Storming In, Leonard Koscianski, 2022

Cloud Illusions, Leonard Koscianski, 2022