Leo Coyte

Brick Bump 1

2023 Charcoal on stonehenge paper 370 x 460mm framed

Leo Coyte’s artworks employ wry humour to embrace the entangled and relational everyday routine of feeling at once empowered by a connection to the seasonal life-cycles of the natural world, whilst also grappling with the existential dread life under late capitalism. Working on images in the studio becomes an arena where he observes the underlying tension felt as anxiety occupies the same space as a sense of freedom. Coyte has developed his own a painterly logic employing vivid colours and playful dark humour to develop an idiosyncratic visual language that cycles through his everyday encounters and subconscious fears; layering and unearthing seemingly unlimited combinations of material and matter. This playful process of free association can also quickly give way to sometimes awkward and exposing reoccurring motifs: bums, testicles, and leaking orifices. Utilising a shallow picture plane with a frontal figure-ground relationship as a stage, he plays-out psychic tableaux where fragmented bodily forms gesture towards sensations we each understand through the visceral biological intensity of being human.