Leon Scott-Engel 

Featured in Surface Tension, 2025

Leon Scott-Engel's manipulation of form is incredibly playful and due to this his works exist between painting and sculpture, illusion and intimacy. Restless, a painting carefully constructed to mirror a mattress, becomes a store of memories, lived histories, the canvas to our dreams. The traces of residue painted on the canvas reflect the lived object. Similar to how the camera slightly distorts the reality it strives to capture, Leon’s paintings leave a ghostly impression upon the viewer. Pulling from memories, the piece leaves space for introspection.

Artist Bio 

Inviting a fragility and tenderness, Leon Scott-Engel’s practice is open in its emotional and physical vulnerability. Scott-Engel’s tailored, upholstered and curved canvases replicate familiar forms, from domestic objects to sports apparatus, using them as a reparative site to share an unguarded impression of the self. Unlike found or readymade objects, these canvases have no lived history, rather they are familiar in form with a blank surface; a clean slate to impart meaning onto. Often pulling from personal memories, tender images, bruises, stains and residues of contact build across their surfaces, mapping an implied presence of intimacy and being; a soft impression left behind in the wake of a memory. Particularly present in the works made to mimic boxing apparatus, these gentle, tender images subvert the objects traditionally violent, hyper-masculine undertones, toward something softer.

Shifting between content and form, painting and sculpture, Scott-Engel’s varied approaches to making converge through a reciprocal relationship between object and viewer. Inherently personal, the work is left to be individually introspective, it’s physicality activated by the viewer. Informed by the architecture of space, the anatomy of the canvas takes on a figuration, coiling and shielding the viewer, like a protective arm or a lap to lie on. As equally as the viewer is inclined to hold and protect the objects before them, the work itself has a protective tendency as it interacts with space and enfolds the viewer, softening the very edges of the spaces they inhabit.

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