Exploring critique and admiration in artist Shaun Leonardo’s exhibit ‘The Invisible Man’

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.

“In Ellison’s book, the unnamed character battles with other people’s perception of him so much that he feels invisible,” said Leonardo. “Men of color are so often competing against a version of themselves that precedes us.”

Leonardo’s drawings create dimensions with lighting and shade. Each figure appears to think and to breathe on canvas. That resounds even more with the various drawings of hands of famous people. The work stands in opposition with senses and common commands. “Look, but don’t touch.” We see the hands — our eyes view them behind glass film, but our brains are convinced that they’re close enough to touch. That’s one of several powerful elements of Leonardo’s work.

Two of the most striking drawings in the exhibition are centered around the relationship between viewer and violence, and how that manifests itself every fall weekend in the U.S. on football fields. Extensive research shows that the sport we love — America’s game — often puts young men in danger by subjecting them to higher rates of brain injuries. “The irony is that we now know more about players’ suffering,” said Leonardo. “It’s visualized for us even more and yet, the NFL is making more money than it’s ever made.”

Leonardo’s complicated relationship with the game and its symptoms stems from playing football through college himself. He watched his teammates and friends manage head injuries long after they took their helmets off for the last time. He even dealt with his own shocking revelations about potential brain injuries. That painful marriage of entertainment and injury between players and patrons motivated his research into sports science.

“The viewer sees themselves implicated in how we observe and analyze concussions,” said Leonardo. “It helps us take the leap to understand one’s own role as a spectator of football and a spectator of violence in promoting that same kind of suffering for our own entertainment.”

However, Leonardo is far from singularly focused. His series of self-titled paintings breaks free of the shroud of charcoal shades associated with his drawings and adds tones somewhere between earth and flesh that aid in telling the story of falling and sleeping. The two large self-portrait paintings strike a balance by adding humanity and vulnerability to figures that otherwise appear god-like.

The two separate video works, as well as Leonardo’s self-titled sculpture, add to the visual buffet he creates for the viewer. The one piece that held me in place, cementing my feet in front of it, immobile, was called “The Messenger.” The wallpaper is a series of dull, monotone, clay-colored images of Sean “Diddy” Combs in various stages of celebration and fellowship, accentuated by champagne flutes, wide grins. and female companions.

“If there’s power in the work, it’s that it’s both critique and admiration for these figures, and the complexity of that is where there is a level of self introspection,” said Leonardo. “It’s very hard and at times hurtful, because in all the figures that I embody in this work, in manhood and in the macho archetypes, is desire.”

Combs, now serving time in federal prison for sex crimes, was once a hip-hop icon and business mogul who was regarded as a shining example of how a man can make it in New York. Now his legacy is tarnished by accusations of sexual assault, drug abuse, violence, and predatory behavior.

“Part of what you see being visualised is men’s desire to live up to or chase this ideal [that] lacks vulnerability, is all powerful, that is offered permission to enact aggression and be the type of figure that is impenetrable,” said Leonardo. “I’m not preserving that figure of Diddy; I’m bringing it to a place where it falls apart.”

This exhibition asks the questions of why eyes and attention are so drawn to pain inflicted on human beings, and how the ideas of masculinity fuel the violence and are constantly attacked by it — and to what end? Shaun Leonardo builds mountains of transfiguration from the dust of his charcoal pen, but the way he sparks conversation in this exhibit is his greatest feat.

“The argument I’m trying to make is that this evidence was right before our eyes all along and when it is in regard to entertainment, celebrity, and masculinity, we constantly make excuses.”

For more info, visit shaunleonardo.com and cristintierney.com.