Artwork Description
Orlando Leyba – Khafre’s Rubrick
Dimensions: 27 x 21.5″ framed / 23.75 x 18″ unframed
Year: 2016
Medium: mixed media on panel
Orlando Leyba’s mixed media on panel work, Khafre’s Rubrick, transcends both formal and temporal contextualization; by referencing the Egyptain Pharaoh in the title of the work, Leyba suggests a historical grounding, yet his highly personal rendering places it within a more contemporary framework. There is a strong sense of narrative to Khafre’s Rubric, leading viewers to question the significance of the dominant red detailing at the top of the composition or the hook-like form extending beside it.
Orlando Leyba’s works oscillate between the abstract and the representational; while free floating and formless, the detailing in his pieces—which demands a degree of intimacy to appreciate—stands in for a wide array of Leyba’s experiences, emotions, and physical encounters. Ranging from custom lowrider cars to petroglyphs, Leyba’s affinity for incorporating found objects and ideas in his work and ability to juxtapose the corporeal with the immaterial, the whimsical with the familiar, introduces a profoundly psychological insight into Leyba’s past and present life as an artist. As a high school student, Leyba describes that he and his classmates would often break into abandoned buildings in search for materials to use in their work. While Leyba’s present practices might now be considered more conventional, he continues to use ideological manifestations of what was once a process of physical collection—incorporating checker patterns reminiscent of his grandparent’s floor, collage materials, and distorted textual elements in a manner not too different from tearing wallpaper from forgotten walls. To Leyba, his works are inherently topographical and interconnected; they interact with one another rather than stand alone and represent “little pieces of land”, a concept ingrained in him from the time spent working on his parent’s property in northern New Mexico as a child.