Leon Bowers

What interests me is taste. What feels good, bad, or banal and how such imagery can gain unexpected weight when painted. A gay cruise ship might resemble a shopping mall, while a cheap trinket a mythical icon. I pull from loosely sourced references, images that are both familiar and estranged, blurred again through painterly translation. A hurried brushstroke can hold excitement or fear while slower gestures nod to older traditions. Within a hodgepodge of imagery, meaning always leaks through an ironic contemplation merging with an active consternation.

My work manoeuvres around sexuality, mythology and emotion. It shifts between intimacy and spectacle, pleasure and confinement, transcendence and restriction. Sometimes it’s playful, sometimes it leans into hypermasculine fantasies or mythological excess. But always it leaves an open space for viewers to project their own readings. Taste is never fixed. Who gets to decide what’s good, what’s bad or worth looking at?