“My work functions as a narrative experience deployed in the public arena.
I build visual stories from daily life that evoke an ordinary set of circumstances, both
rooted in reality and shared experience, but that don’t function as expected.
I like to develop projects that push the audience beyond the conceptual threshold and I enjoy working with a variety of media and modes of expression. My work includes installations, objects, sculptures, videos and even painting. I create structures that trigger images and ideas that, in turn, point towards new
realities. I like to consider these pieces as relational devices that inspire interaction and play amongst the viewers. I understand art as a medium for cultivating new approaches to understanding the world, physical, mental, political, symbolic.”
Leandro Erlich

Buildings on which one appears to climb, houses uprooted and suspended in mid-air, lifts going nowhere, escalators tangled like threads in a ball of yarn, disorienting and surreal sculptures, and videos that subvert normality.
These are all elements telling us something ordinary in an extraordinary context, in which everything is different from what it seems, and where we lose our sense of reality and perception of space, in which the observers become active participants or an integral part of the work.
Erlich’s works are the result of a profound and conceptual artistic exploration that plays with the paradoxes of perception.
The artist takes us to a magical elsewhere, where the possible becomes impossible, but that astonishes and excites thanks to a great aesthetic sense and a highly intrinsic poetry.
The result is explosive, fun, exciting, and unforgettable.
His work explores the perceptual bases of reality and our ability to question these same bases through a visual framework. The architecture of everyday life is a recurring theme in Erlich’s art, which aims to create a dialogue between what we believe and what we see, just as it seeks to bridge the gap between museum space and everyday experience.

MR. WANG, WE WERE LITERALLY DAZZLED BY YOUR MASTERPIECES, THEY APPEAR DELICATE, REFINED, A SENSE OF PARTICULAR NOSTALGIA SHINES THROUGH THEM, BUT THEY HAVE SUCH EXPRESSIVE STRENGTH! WHO ARE THE CHARACTERS YOU DEPICT ON THE CANVAS, WHAT DO THEY REPRESENT?

Thank you so much. There are some characters that I created and for some of them I used my close friends as models. I guess they represent some of my states of mind through different times. Also the attitude and the struggles with my circle of friends maybe (I’m not sure), part of our generation of Chinese artists.

YOU LIVED IN BEIJING FOR PART OF YOUR LIFE, THEN YOUR PATH TOOK YOU ELSEWHERE: TO FLORENCE, FRANCE, NEW YORK AND TODAY YOU LIVE IN CANADA, BUT THE CONTEXT OF THE STORIES YOU TELL THROUGH YOUR WORKS IS LINKED TO CHINESE CULTURE, TO YOUR COUNTRY OF ORIGIN, WHY?

Perhaps because of my age, I seem to naturally realize that the period of adolescence in China has played an increasingly important role in my life and almost shaped my identity. China in the 1990s was also in a very interesting period. Maybe it is the age, I’m always recalling the past.

I BELIEVE THAT ONE OF THE DISORIENTING ASPECTS OF YOUR PAINTINGS ARE THE TEMPORAL INCONSISTENCIES. WE FIND OURSELVES SUSPENDED IN AN INDEFINITE TIME IN WHICH PRESENT, PAST, FUTURE MIX AND OVERLAP TO ULTIMATELY BECOME A FACT THAT IS PART OF NORMAL. WHY THIS CHOICE AND WHAT VALUE DOES TIME HAVE FOR YOU?

From 2010 to 2016, I returned to live in Beijing for a few years. I stayed in the apartment I lived in when I was a child. I often passed by my elementary and middle school. I sorted out my memories and imagined the history of the city where I grew up, such as the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Tungus people outside the Yongding Gate, the rebels plotting in the Taoranting Park, the old people dancing in the park now, the elementary school students happily boating in Beihai Park in the 1960s, the Tibetan Tantra Buddhist statue in the White Stupa in the Beihai Park, the 2008 Olympic Games, the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party, and the workers who rode their bicycles in the wind to work… These images point to the primary stage of socialism and the emperor national power, the spiritual world of Tantra Buddhism Mandala, someone‘s romance of the youth time and other unsympathetic situations… Some situations have existed here but have never disappeared. I feel that they are competing with each other and tearing out a kind of tension, which may lead to something poetic. There is this kind of tension around me, an entangled and vague sense of history. I feel that I have to deal with it in painting.

THIS HUMANITY THAT YOU NARRATE TRANSMITS DIFFERENT STATES OF MIND BUT SOMETIMES IT APPEARS ‘LOST’ IN SOMETHING. OFTEN THE GAZE IS ABSENT. HOW MUCH OF YOUR EMOTIONS, OF YOUR INNER WORLD, IS REFLECTED IN YOUR WORKS?

I’m not sure how much emotions are reflected in my works. For me, some emotions are not meant to be reflected in art, some emotions need to not only reflect but also to transform into art.

YOU SAID THAT YOUR WORK IS A RESPONSE TO THE IMBALANCE BETWEEN YOUR INNER FEELINGS AND THE WORLD OUTSIDE. CAN YOU HELP US BETTER UNDERSTAND THIS CONCEPT?

As an artist, I always feel there’s a distance from the mainstream society, but after all I’m still living in it, I need to transform my inner feeling into art, in some ways it creates another world where I can find peace of mind.

WE FIND YOUR WORKS AMAZING. THE WORLD THEY TELL IS SURPRISING AND IT IS AS IF THEY INVITED US TO LOOK FOR SOMETHING MORE THAN WHAT WE SEE. YOU OFTEN FIND THE UNEXPECTED, UNCANNY ELEMENT, BUT PERFECTLY INTEGRATED IN YOUR NARRATION. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO LEAD US, DO YOU HAVE A MESSAGE AND A PRECISE INTENT?

First of all, thank you! And, in answer to your question, I don’t think there is a clear reply to that. I think that as an artist you are constantly looking for that, or at least I am. And what I want to tell I often only know after I have completed a photography series. And that also changes per series and per life phase in which I find myself. Ultimately, of course, the answer can be found in the work itself, for me a lot of text is often not necessary. I think good art (by other makers) is often good because it touches me right away, without explanations.

I am mainly looking for a harmonious game between landscape and man, the blending of the body in the landscape is what I am often seeking.

I choose that intuitively at first. So, do I want to work in a dry vast graphic landscape or in a lush environment with wild flowers and organic shapes? Then I investigate where I can find these landscapes that I have in my head, and then I am mainly surprised on the spot with what I encounter by doing road trips.

YOUR PROCESS OF SIMPLIFICATION/SYNTHESIZING OF THE COMPOSITION SEEMS TO BE A FUNDAMENTAL PHASE OF YOUR WORKS. HOW DOES IT HAPPEN?

I’m not sure if I understand your question correctly, but I do often like to find a kind of simplicity/abstractness, regardless of my use of bright colors or poses with energy.

IN EACH OF YOUR WORKS THE POWERFULLY PRESENT ELEMENT IS COLOR, ITS STRENGTH, THE BOLD WAY IN WHICH YOU USE IT. DO YOU GIVE COLORS A SEMANTIC VALUE LIKE IN KANDINSKY’S TREATISES (ABOUT THE SPIRITUALITY OF COLOUR) OR IS THE FUNCTION SIMPLY AIMED AT MAKING THE ELEMENTS SURREAL?

It is mainly aimed at creating my own realities, landscapes and moment. I don’t like to be distracted by the way things are (such as the grass is green, a rock is grey) but rather see the world as a black and white coloring page and then color it according to how I feel about it. I feel that moment. I make all these choices intuitively and by feeling.

WHAT IS THE INCIPIT, THE INITIAL IDEA THAT KICKS YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS OFF?

That actually differs per series! Sometimes I make a series based on 1 idea, sometimes on sketches that I make for months and sometimes I work on a series without having come up with an idea beforehand. Then I come up with everything on the spot, on the location.

OFTEN THE ARTIST IS PRESENT WITHIN HIS OWN WORK. IN YOUR CASE DOES THIS HAPPEN SPONTANEOUSLY OR IS IT DUE TO YOUR INNER NEED?

You mean I do self-portraits? I do that because I feel that my work is the most sincere. That’s how I started shooting when I was 14/15, and continued like that after years of trying different things during my photography studies at art school.

A LOT OF VISUAL, STYLISTIC AND COMPOSITIONAL RESEARCH EMERGES IN YOUR WORKS. A STUDY BASED ON EXTENSIVE EXPERIMENTATION IN COLOR AND MATERIAL COMBINATIONS: WHAT IS THE BASIC CONCEPT OF YOUR WORK FOR YOU? DO YOU INTEND TO CONVEY AN ETHICAL/MORAL MESSAGE?

I am not trying to give a moral or ethical message. At first I make it because it comes from deep within, an urge to create. And so I make it for myself in the first place. And then you can see it more as a form of escapism, for myself and the viewer, than that I’m busy showing things from the ‘real’ world. I actually like to get people and myself out of there, that’s how I designed my last exhibition. It was an object in a room, where you walked in and out through 1 entrance and 1 exit. As a result, people were completely isolated from the space around them and walked through my landscapes and works like a kind of maze. It was very special that the idea of my photography aroused so well in exhibition form. I have received many positive reactions and reviews from visitors about it!