Leonardo Vandal
Vandal was born in 1988 in Denmark. Vandal is a multidisciplinary artist working across different mediums, such as painting, sculpture, installation, and writing. Nostalgia and melancholy permeate the experience of his work. The artist transforms his experiences of personal trauma in his early life into a visual poetic and enigmatic language through the use of every medium he finds relevant within his reach. There is an antithesis between presence and absence, being free and confined, a wandering dialogue between reality and illusion. This invites the viewer to meander in the land of the unwanted and unseen. The title work, I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud (The Solitary Wanderer), explores the notion and curiousness of reality with the large Pocket Paintings, which he calls them. Vandal’s work is purely based on the inner. The work is a form of catharsis for Vandal, and the process of creating the work proves therapeutic, and the viewer is presented with something deep and serene. His autumnal- coloured paintings, the Adagio paintings otherwise known as his Landscapes, likely what Vandal is most known for, are made in such a way that he is able to explore the painting in the same way as the viewer. Vandal’s ideology is based on the poet Keats’ term, ‘Negative Capability’ and is drawn to various and often unusual mediums for their symbolic potency. The study of the mind is based on Jung’s psychoanalysis, investigating trauma and the life in between the conscious and the unconscious parts of ourselves. Vandal defines his work as a ‘medley of silence’ and ‘the embroidery to the time he is given’.


