Leandro Júnior: Ten Paintings & Duane Park Studios Design Collective
Curated by Damon Brandt and Simon Watson
Presented by Salt Mine Projects and Simon Watson Arts
May 11th, 2023 - June 10th, 2023
Forty years ago, I opened up my first gallery in a second floor walk up loft on Bond Street in Noho, painting the tin ceiling with a friend, banging nails into brick walls and typing out invitations on an IBM Selectric appropriated from a past employer.
On May 11th of 2023, I returned to old habits and latent desires and transformed our loft in Tribeca into an exhibition space. Simon Watson, a trusted friend and respected associate, and I installed the paintings of a talented artist from rural Brazil; Leandro Júnior. We are also presented work from a new venture; Duane Park Studios Design Collective, a fluid collaborative group of conceptually nomadic and compulsively curious designers, engineers, and artists.
Richly colored and so finely rendered with an attention to detail that is remarkable, Leandro Júnior’s paintings invite you to enter into an intimate examination of his perception of the lives lived around him. These naturalist portraits of young Afro-Brazilian women and men are depicted walking and dancing, silhouetted against a mottled blue sky.
Born of an Afro-Brazilian father and a white mother in the arid and rural valley of Jequitinhonha, Leandro Júnior was raised in one of the many quilombo communities founded in the 19th century by runaway slaves who were originally brought to Brazil’s Minas Gerais region to work in the local mines. Despite the tragic and complex historical legacy of this region along with the current challenges of pervasive poverty, the existing culture can be defined by a vibrancy and resiliency of spirit that is immediately evident to any visitor and apparent in the compelling portraits that have become the signature and celebrated work of this talented young painter.
Leandro is both sensualist and sociologist, often turning his attention to the community in his life whom he sees as the core identity, strength and backbone of his extended and sprawling family of survivors. He has a photographer’s eye for the incidental moment of physical posture and an old master’s attention to detail. His portraits are at the same time specific and symbolic, a dichotomy that he is able to achieve by focusing his painterly prowess primarily on the backs of his subjects. Not the standard portrait pose, Leandro uses everything from hair style, clothing, and body language to represent presence and personality. There is also an uncommon connection here between audience and subject in that both look outward simultaneously in a disarming moment of shared expectation. The actual material that the artist uses to depict the men, women, and children of his region are a direct extension of the local terroir. The very clay and minerals under Leandro's feet are gathered, pulverized, refined and liquified into the palette of colors with which he paints his subjects.
In the past three years, Leandro Júnior’s work has appeared in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions throughout Brazil at the National Museum in Brasília and São Paulo's Instituto Santo Amaro and Museu de Arte Sacra as well as in commercial galleries Central Galeria, São Paulo. In 2022 he made his first North American appearance in an exhibition at Slag Gallery, Chelsea New York. Leandro Júnior is scheduled for his first European solo exhibition at RX Galerie, Paris in 2024.
Duane Park Studios Design Collective
In a natural extension to Salt Mine Project’s defining credo of collaboration, Duane Park Studio Design Collective was recently formed to encourage and support a wide range of creative endeavors where functional design and fine art cross-pollinate.
On May 11th, concurrent with the opening of an exhibition of 10 paintings by Brazilian artist, Leandro Júnior, (in association with Simon Watson Arts) our Collective had its first presentation of two artists; Nancy Boas and John Calcagno.
With the painstaking patience and hand of a jeweler, Nancy Boas carves forms out of wax that find primary inspiration in the world of flora and fauna. The structure of flowers about to bloom and the architecture of the supporting leaves and stems are a particular obsession and form the basis for a series of candle sticks, bud vases, and incense burners cast in bronze and silver. Her watercolors and carved insects made over the last 5 years, along with Andrew Zuckerman’s startling images from his celebrated book FLOWER, will accompany Ms. Boas’s presentation.
John Calcagno, a revered and respected member of the design community for over 50 years and a legendary eye for balance, beauty, and legacy, has turned his attention to a pair of old hand forged iron chairs, found in a favorite shop in West Palm. His intervention with frayed vintage caning and twisted twine has turned function into pure form in a celebration of the contrasts and conflicts of fragility, transparency and stability. A photographer as well, John’s chairs are accompanied by a limited edition hand bound book of black and white images documenting his process.
Duane Park Studio Design Collective was also very pleased to include a permanent installation of eye-catching and innovative wallpaper. To quote founders Nicole Bergen and Andrew Zuckerman, “SUPERFLOWER creates wallpaper based on precise photographic investigations of flowers. Our patterns harness the history of flower arrangement in futuristic resolution and clarity….and reflects a contemporary perspective on a traditional craft”.
Duane Park Studio Design Collective also introduced a curated collection of vintage Tibetan Sleeping Rugs, disarming in their minimalist simplicity and utility. Assembled largely in the field by the ever astute and creative eye of designer and dealer Joe Carini, these rugs are first hand spun and then woven on small back looms using undyed wool. Produced under nomadic conditions, these body friendly rugs embody the unquenchable creative impulse for beauty and comfort, even when under the duress of forced movement.
Photography by Sofia Franzese