What you see is what you get, but right now in Tribeca, Shaun Leonardo takes up arms against that all too common idiom in his latest solo exhibit at the Cristin Tierney Gallery. In The Invisible Man, you see enigmatic images of familiar figures, the brilliance of Black and Brown bodies in motion, freefall, submission, performance, and release, but what you get from Leonardo is a mirror that reflects one’s own voyeuristic nature.
“The strategy that I do employ is actually offering you the subject that you might feel most attracted to, whether that is in its spectacle of violence,” said Leonardo. “My job is to turn your perception of what you are participating in on its head and to implicate you, the viewer, in participating in that realm.”
Leonardo’s exhibition spans various mediums, including painting, video, sculpture, and—of course—the medium that he’s held closest to his heart: drawing. He claims that each individual work is tethered to drawing, no matter how the art manifests itself, and that each work is tied to a similar narrative that lives in the title of the exhibition. The Invisible Man is a reference to the culturally groundbreaking literary work by Ralph Ellison. While Ellison’s work explored the experience of a Black man who feels invisible because society refuses to truly see him, Leonardo’s work harnesses that same concept of invisibility by putting men back under the microscope.
