Cadogan Gallery is delighted to announce “The Shyness of the Peaks”, a new body of work by Leonardo Anker Vandal opening in London on 3 July.
In this evocative new body of work, Vandal’s paintings inhibit many tales as he composes a polyphonic visual narrative—one melody unfolding in three distinct songs: the duality, the antithesis, and the contrast. These paintings concentrate primarily on order and symmetry, but beneath their surface lies an alchemy: the unpredictable reaction between ink and water on raw linen. The medium bleeds, spreads, and fuses, softening the boundaries between form and formlessness, until what remains is a terrain of blurred contours and hallucinating lines. The liminal spaces created are at once deliberate and accidental, allowing Vandal to conceive of his own work as a viewer.
The title of this new exhibition is drawn from a natural occurrence known as crown shyness: the cloud-like gaps that appear between the canopies of trees where their crowns grow close yet never touch. Held in delicate suspension, these spaces hint at intimacy withheld, connection deferred. Here, as in his recent waterlily studies, Vandal observed how materials could echo natural phenomena: the delicate dance of elements, the tension between expansion and containment. It was through this experimentation that another metaphor emerged—Arrokoth.
“Arrokoth”, a distant trans-Neptunian object was discovered by NASA in 2014. Formed by the gentle merging of two ancient bodies, Arrokoth became a cosmic metaphor for the artist: two fragments orbiting in isolation until they become one. Through years of experimentation, Vandal developed a technique to echo this union—creating single surfaces from the collision of distinct elements. These paintings are meditations on time, touch, and the quiet poetry of things coming together, slowly and unexpectedly, across vast distances.
© Text and Photo Courtesy of Cadogan Gallery
