Leonardo Silaghi – Noise Distorted Perspective
The figurative paintings by Leonardo Silaghi unite seemingly unfinished, gestural-expressive sections with elaborately detailed areas. Heavy gray machines are placed within the picture in a unique way. Colored accents appear in contrast to a broad pallet of different gray tones.
Leonardo Silaghi finds his motifs in his immediate vicinity and on the World Wide Web. In a first step, the artist digitally processes images that he has found or photographed himself of abandoned, mostly ruinous industrial plants or complex machinery and equipment. In a second step, he transfers these digital collages onto a canvas on which he has already created an abstract, colorful composition. The figurative motif, which he presents in a variety of shades of gray, is subjected to multiple transformations in the process of painting. In this way, the finished painting becomes different from the original collage.
From 18 January to 23 February 2013, Galerie Kornfeld presents the work of young Romanian painter Leonardo Silaghi(b. 1987) for the first time in Western Europe.
Silaghi’s figurative paintings unite seemingly unfinished, gestural–expressive passages with elaborately detailed areas. Heavy grey machines are uniquely positioned within the pictorial space, while coloured accents emerge in contrast to a broad palette of grey tones.
Leonardo Silaghi sources his motifs from his immediate surroundings as well as from the World Wide Web. In a first step, the artist digitally processes images—either found or self-photographed—depicting abandoned, often ruinous industrial plants or complex machinery. In a second step, he transfers these digital collages onto canvas, which he has already prepared with an abstract, colourful composition. The figurative motifs, rendered in varying shades of grey, undergo multiple transformations throughout the painting process. As a result, the finished painting diverges significantly from the original collage.
Silaghi’s painting practice is grounded in the tension between opposing positions: gestural abstraction meets figurative description; grey monochrome encounters intense colour. For Silaghi, the painterly gesture—the individual brushstroke—is simultaneously an act of free artistic expression and a descriptive element.
Rather than striving for a perfect image, Silaghi embraces the productive potential of error. He connects the distortion of tones, sounds and images with a painterly investigation of concepts such as image noise and light diffraction—phenomena associated with (digital) photography. By adopting these disturbances as essential components of his work, Silaghi transforms interference into a positive, generative force.
Silaghi’s works also comment on the socio-political situation in Romania, a country still in a transitional phase—grappling with the legacy of communism while navigating the challenges of a new capitalist system.
Leonardo Silaghi graduated from the University of Art and Design in Cluj (Romania). Since 2009, he has held solo exhibitions at Laika Gallery (Cluj), the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (Peekskill, USA) and Marc Straus Gallery (New York). In 2010, he was artist-in-residence at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. More recently, his work was shown in the exhibition After the Fall at the HVCCA in Peekskill and at the Knoxville Museum of Art (USA).