Michael Leon

6:59 AM

Michael R. León’s paintings, videos and installations are fueled by a personal but socially encrypted symbolic narrative. Deeply layered and destined to disintegrate into fiction, they are loaded with pop and catholic icons, colonial insignia, Meso-American myth, geometries, border stories and drug war paraphernalia. His paintings sometimes take the Picabian approach to layering images of profane and nominally sacred symbols and methods of painting. Leon’s anti-allegorical tableaus are composed of interrupted views of place and figuration, where formal divisions and segues between symbolic forms and figures obscure and marshal any single reading of narrative. The hymnal is all heavy metal from here; his work is populated by a bestiary of auto-body, animal and mythical saints/devils, while his brush contends with street styles, comics, tattoos, gestural painting, gothic and late renaissance themes of cultural cannibalism anthropophagy, death, sacrifice, and identity.