Leo Frontini paints worlds within worlds, landscapes and interiors that dissolve and cohere in a kaleidoscopic logic. In Everlapsing Interlude, scenes murkily slip between endings and Beginnings, and the familiar bends into the foreign. With this new body of work, Frontini mines the space between the folkloric, fairytale-esque “ever after” of a resolved story and the “everlasting” of something that refuses to conclude. Rather than a fixed answer or meaning, these works operate as liquid narratives, offering an interlude that interrupts the flow and lapsing marks of both duration and decay. At a moment when the pace of the world compresses experience into instant outcomes, Frontini’s dream-like kingdoms slow time, foregrounding reflection and the processes that unfold in the unseen intervals between actions.

Born and raised in Cleveland, and earning his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2023, Frontini’s academic background draws on both traditional studio practice and a persistent interest in how space, perspective, and distortion can be reimagined. It is as if he has reverse-engineered his approach to painting, translating an internal logic of space into the tactile language of the canvas. While at Otis, Chris Warner’s drawing classes provided a fundamental grounding in anatomy and gesture, yet also fostered an openness to dismantle those systems. Frontini takes the rules and vocabulary of classical, academic training and reconfigures them into something distinctly his own. The body becomes a site of transmutation, whereby anatomical expectation gives way to new forms and logics, and figures transition between different states, acting as conduits for shifting narratives that unfold across seemingly unending portals.

Frontini draws on the buoyancy of Rococo, the dramatic thrust of Reubens and Breugel, and the liberation of color found in Monet, Vuillard, Bonnard, and the graphic clarity of Byzantine art. Linear perspective is deliberately compressed, pulling the eye toward a close vanishing point. Scale shifts constantly, as monumental bodies appear alongside diminutive figures, creating the sensation of a spastic zooming in and out at once. It’s as if we’re peering into these paintings through the perspective of a lens articulating its focal lengths.

This contiguous zoom is present in Anamnesis, where a circular aperture divides two realms. In the foreground, two figures recline in bed, their forms softening into pools of water and folds of cloth. A door lies flat on the ground like a stand-in for a grave, leaves and small drifting figures hover at the edge of the scene, and the light is both cool and warm. Beyond this threshold rises a diving tower, its stark geometry and small human silhouettes interrupting the intimacy of the interior. The effect is jittering and fleeting, the present overwhelmed by the past, the private folding into the public. For Frontini, draft-making is the stage where these narratives take shape. He avoids starting from a static reference, preferring a generative process that combines automatic drawing, composite photographic fragments, and live modeling. Often using his own body as reference, he poses to find the weight, tilt, and reach that each scene demands. The process is an act of negotiation by which perspectives shift, proportions stretch or compress, and individual elements find their place like pieces of a puzzle. Some compositions resolve in the drawing stage, others resist and demand rethinking until they organically fall into place.

In The Horizon Lines Rise, this puzzle is made monumental, and in turn is emblematic of many of the show’s central themes. The painting reflects the processes and cycles of the day, the transfer from morning to day to night, and the body’s embedded role in these natural rhythms. At the center, a towering, statuesque figure threads a glowing string of orbs through her hands, while another figure braces and pulls the line taut, as though hoisting the sun into the sky. Nearby, a boy in a jester’s costume rings bells above a reclining figure, who also holds a set of bells in hand. In the background, a small gathering appears to prepare for a ritual, their focus converging around a concentrated light source. Behind it all, a swirling green expanse hovers between ocean and sky, or perhaps some mythological substance binding the two. The scene is at once cosmic and domestic, a creation myth spoken in the language of the morning chore of rising from sleep.

Frontini’s expansive worlds often emerge from the meeting point between personal memory, lived experience, and fiction. Of Bountiful Folly springs from the artist’s childhood experience of raspberry picking in Ohio, yet the scene is infused with the visual flavor of Socialist Realism. Bodies bend, crouch, and nearly contort, baskets and bowls brimming, while a steeply tilted horizon and luminous sky push the scene toward the edge of stability. The balance of thematic weight and formal precision is supported by Frontini’s technical considerations. His surfaces are primed with multiple layers of gesso, sanded until any trace of canvas texture disappears, a practice maintained from his early years of painting mainly on wood panels. He mixes his own mediums of stand oil, drying linseed oil, mineral spirits, and Venetian medium to control viscosity, luminosity, and drying time. Pigments are selected for their feel as much as their color, and each layer is considered in relation to the one before, unified through couching to keep the surface alive.

Sculpture and glassworks act as connective tissue for the exhibition, bringing into three dimensions ideas that appear in the paintings. A marble figure, taken from a missing presence in one canvas, steps into the gallery space with a quiet power. Glass raspberries distill the cycles of growth, memory, and continuity that shape the work.

In Everlapsing Interlude, moments before and after action matter as much as the action itself. The works function as a record of the hesitation before a gesture, the breath before speech, or the pause that holds the weight of what comes next. Frontini treats these interludes as fractal spaces where the more one looks, the more there is to find. They are reminders that even in stillness, the world is turning, beginning, and ending all at once.

-Simon Brewer