VLAB is pleased to present the solo exhibition “PLAY” featuring an enfilade of works by LEONARDO that have never shown before. Since his first exhibition at VLAB in Madrid, Leonardo returns with a spectacular solo show in New York.

The 9-year-old young artist, Leonardo, started his career in 2017 with a Spanish gallery and jumped into the Asian market participating in international art fairs such as KIAF Seoul and Art Busan with different Korean galleries.

Leonardo started drawing both at home and at school as an entertainment and nowadays has become an international artist with a unique and desired work. Instead of taking him to painting classes, his parents have taken him to artists' studios where he could soak in the new artistic influences. This is how we can consider Leonardo's paintings are a direct access to the children's world. His inspirations are the comics he reads, the cartoons he sees and his favorite fictional characters.

"PLAY" features works based on the motif of the exhibition's title. For Leonardo the game is a serious matter and there is no other way to emphasize it than by transferring human emotions to the chess pieces, which are gambling everything.

This kind of humanization of objects emerges at two levels: through the personality, for example in cutlery suffering from basic emotions such as fear and rejection, and through the physical characteristics: the eyes, the mouth, etc. And it is mainly with this that Leonardo likes to play, taking it out of its context and mixing it with mechanical parts, to create surreal creatures.

From this background comes the series of boats with legs, beaks, teeth and faces, designed to reach cities without a harbor, and the animals as well like “La Arragosta Pellegrina”, “Elefante Marino” or "Camaleonte Capriccioso".

The "Schoolnotes" drawings are a kind of non-preparatory sketches that let Leonardo play with different elements in the same large-scale support. As Albert Einstein said: "Play is the highest form of research".

What if… 

The knife didn't want to hurt anyone and refused to cut?

The fork couldn't prick anything? 

And the spoon didn't like the soup?

The exhibition “Play” by Leonardo will be on view from April 20th to April 30th, 2023 at VLAB, New York, 60 East 80th Street, New York, NY 10075, USA.