Artist Statement: Orlando Leyba 2022

My work oscillates between the abstract and the representational, the past intertwined with the present. While free floating and formless, the detailing in my pieces stands in for a wide array of my experiences, emotions, and physical encounters. Ranging from custom lowrider cars to petroglyphs, my affinity for incorporating found objects and ideas in my work and ability to juxtapose the corporeal with the immaterial, the whimsical with the familiar, the forgotten with the unknown, introduces an insight into my past and present life as an artist. While my current practices might now be considered more conventional, I continue to use ideological manifestations of what was once a process of physical collection—incorporating checker patterns reminiscent of my grandparents’ floor, collage materials, and layered textural elements in a manner not too different from tearing wallpaper from forgotten walls, and all with the idea that what doesn’t feel right I erase! I am motivated by the approach that Richard Diebenkorn, a hero of mine from art school days, has stated, “There is nothing I can’t paint over.” My works are inherently re-worked, layered by time and growth, topographical and interconnected; they interact with one another rather than stand alone and represent little vignettes, pieces of land, a concept ingrained in me from the time spent working on my grandparents’ land in northern New Mexico as a child. They are ‘reborn’; they reflect a familiar landscape of beauty intertwined with chaos and dysfunction, historical traditions colliding with contemporary practices, and the eroded with the newly formed.