Painter Conrad Leach is having a show in Los Angeles this month (Feb 9 - Arp 19, 2013), at the new
Subvecta Motus Gallery. Here's what I wrote in the exhibition catalog:
"Conrad Leach is wrestling the angel of Art on the Bonneville
Salt Flats. He’s been at it for 15
years, and is winning, fixing on canvas a transcendent vision of the noisy,
dangerous and highly romantic struggle of a certain type of character, willing
to risk all for a worthless wreath of laurel. While painters have grappled with motorization since
Turner’s ‘Rain, Steam, and Speed’ of
1844, few have made it their career, fewer still push past the nostalgia and
kitsch which ruin the genre.
Ignoring all that, Leach’s interior dig, to access that gnawing crux of
Meaning, brings us unironically to the realm of signs and icons. His technique is super-cool, but his
blood is burning; like the heroes he paints, he’s in it.
Leach has chosen Los Angeles for his US solo painting début, for
this place, perfumed with gasoline vapor and scrubbed-off rubber, designed
exclusively for, reliant on, and despairing of the internal combustion engine
more than anyplace on earth, has clutched the Wheel to its tarmac heart, squeezing
out speed, distorting the vehicle’s very shape in the loving, where all manner
of lovechildren -bastard little hotrod freaks- are born. Conrad Leach is the portrait painter of
such beasts, and such men."
Subvecta Motus Gallery is owned by
Justin Kell of
Glory Sales and Service, and is curated by
MOCA veteran
Stacie B London; both are fine art professionals with deep roots in motorcycling, although the gallery isn't 'about' motoring...they just like Conrad's paintings!
Subvecta Motus: 518 West Garfield Ave, Glendale CA
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