“We should be home by now,” – Leo Mock.
“We should be home by now.” The sentiment embedded in the title hovers over the autumn weatherscapes like a distant love. Should we have arrived somewhere meaningful by now, somewhere steady, fulfilling, spiritual, or even just terrestrially grounded? But arrival is always fleeting, always provisional. Home, if it exists at all, is a sensation that evaporates the instant we attempt to grasp it, as mutable as a cloud. The exhibition’s title, lifted from David Bowie’s song Time, with all the implied yearning and sly existential ache, frames Leo Mock’s suite of paintings, which feel at once personal and cosmically estranged.
The sky performs as though it knows we need it to. Sunsets flare like Ruscha, churn like Van Gogh. But the painter resists the hubris of trying to fix such meteorological perfection. Instead, he paints mockeries of emotions and beauty too fleeting to hold, mementos of perfect moments that refuse to stay put.
Even in the darker scenes, skies thickened to wildfire soot and horizons smothered into near-oblivion, Mock’s worlds never fully tip toward despair. Instead, they vibrate with a gentle, hypnotic hum, as though tuned to the frequency of a planet we have not yet discovered but somehow remember. His landscapes are vacant yet never empty, serene yet never still. They are less depictions of places than invitations into states of mind, those liminal zones where longing meets wonder, and where the desire to “be home” is both impossible and endlessly seductive.
The world in Mock’s paintings is familiar but unmistakably off-axis. Horizon lines, mountain masses, cumulus stacks, and reflective waters gesture toward earthly landscapes, yet everything is skewed just enough to belong to some adjacent reality. Color, acidity, improbable light, they are all destabilizers. The atmosphere itself shifts: dirty pink vapors streak across onyx skies, bruise-colored clouds elongate into aerodynamic messengers, reds and greens ooze down from above as though obeying a physics particular to some distant moon. These are landscapes assembled from earthly building blocks but recomposed into a new syntax.
In the end, that is what Mock paints: not light itself but the echo of its passing, not emotion but its vapor trail, not home but the hope for it. And in that hope, tenuous, flickering, ungraspable, we recognize something profoundly human. These paintings take us somewhere only Leo Mock can imagine, but they return us, gently, to ourselves.
Leo Mock (b. 1964, Los Angeles, CA) graduated from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. Recent solo exhibitions include Blocking Your Sun at Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Rise and Fall of Shame at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin; In the Jingle Jangle Morning at Tif Sigfrids, New York; and …And Still Somehow at M+B, Los Angeles. His work has recently been featured in The New York Times and ArtReview. Mock lives and works in Mérida, Mexico.