James English Leary b. 1982, Chicago, USA. Lives and works in New York, USA. He is an adjunct professor at The Cooper Union in New York City and a founding member of The Bruce High Quality Foundation and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, a free arts university operating in New York City. The Foundation’s works have been included in Greater New York at MOMA Ps1, The 2010 Whitney Biennial and The Sundance Film Festival.

The paintings of James English Leary (*1982 Chicago, US) pit figuration against abstraction invoking metaphors that nurse (and satirize) camp-psychological states in the viewer.

Rather than “painting the paintings” Leary constructs them out of painting’s component parts (stretcher, fabric, color, in that order) often employing a shaped substrate.

The resulting image-objects and their buoyant overtures towards a “language” humorously engage the problematics of how to “read” a painting and conjure the art experience as a slapstick rorschach, a drama of legibility, which hinges on the impossibility of making a shape that doesn’t eventually refer back to something of this world.