About the work

Jean Leopold is a French-British artist, born in Dubai in 2002. His painting starts from life as it is lived: friends gathered around a table, a boat trip on a summer afternoon, a quiet cigarette in the garden. Moments that would usually pass unnoticed become the subject of the work.

Many of these scenes begin as photographs taken in the moment, then are slowly reworked on canvas. What interests him is less the event itself than the feeling it leaves behind, the heat, the boredom, the ease of being together, and the way an ordinary instant can carry more than it first seems to.

His practice is defined by an openness to materials. Coloured pencils, oil pastels, acrylic and oils often meet on the same canvas, their marks left visible: hatched skies, dense layers of pastel, flat areas of colour. Each series is also a chance to try something new, and the choice of medium shifts with the subject.

His earlier work took a different form, dense, map-like landscapes seen from above, where small figures, animals and architecture formed layered scenes, as in Far to the Far West and Atlas of Sand. That attention to detail and to small narratives remains, now brought closer, to eye level.

Across all of it runs the same intention: to make images that reward a slow look, and that hold, beneath their simplicity, something of what it felt like to be there.