Leandro Comrie imbues portraits of everyday people with a rare sense of wonder, in Guttenberg Arts show

“The Quiet Lady,” by Leandro Comrie.

Leandro Comrie’s portraits hum with history. Strange and ironic tales are inscribed on the faces of his subjects. We can’t say exactly what has happened to the 20 or so people depicted in “Things I Remember,” which is on view at Guttenberg Arts through June 20. And Comrie, cagey chap that he is, isn’t telling. But we can guess from their expressions and their postures that they have lived lives that are at once complicated and ordinary, mythological and all-too-human. Many of them look like they are guarding secrets. They bat eyes at us conspiratorially. If there is sympathy to give, they want to give it. If there is a joke to tell, they want us in on it.

The Venezuelan-American artist’s rare combination of storytelling, technique and mystique has brought him to the front rank of portraitists working in the Garden State. His 2025 summer show at the IMUR Gallery in Jersey City was a procession of gags, seductions, intentional vexations and pure fun, with roots deep in naturism, Tarot symbolism and South American folklore. It didn’t seem possible he could top it.

Top it he has, and then some. “Things I Remember” is a bright and swinging gateway into Comrie’s world. It’s a warm place, swept by tradewinds — foreign, but somehow familiar. It may remind you of vacationland. It may remind you of home.

At prior shows, some of Comrie’s characters felt inscrutable. Not here. The people in “Things I Remember” greet the viewer with generosity, or bold, irreducible individuality, or pure defiance. They grab you and don’t let go easily. Take “The Quiet Lady,” with her mahogany-colored skin, eyelids as heavy as a living room drape, cocked eyebrow, and closed and slanted mouth. Her reticence is apparent, but she is also daring the viewer to riddle her out. The “Lady” grips a great green hand with a brown one like she is clinging to a wedding corsage; she is in a sitting room, but a lush, verdant scene is visible through the window behind her. Comrie reinforces the domesticity of his subject by dressing her in paper doilies and swatches of old tablecloth. She is composed of the scraps of the kitchens and pantries past; she has absorbed their details, and their essence, and serves as a reminder of worlds bygone.

“The Elder,” by Leandro Comrie.

Her counterpart is “The Elder,” which ties with “The Quiet Lady” for the title of the best painting Comrie has ever created. With his bald head, his boxy buttoned-down shirt, his patched-up pants and his placid expression, he is a humble sort of patriarch. He could be anybody’s genial abuelo, kind-eyed, welcoming, and with the seeds of a smile gathered at the corners of his mouth. Yet Comrie has surrounded him with subtle symbols of power, including a bird, beak open and proud, just above his right shoulder, and a mountain landscape and an azure sky above his left. The posts of his chair resemble sanctuary candlesticks, and there is more than a whisper of the temple about the whole scene. With quiet authority, “The Elder” sits on his everyman’s throne, comfortable in his meditation, all traces of fear banished.

Just like “The Quiet Lady,” “The Elder” is made of the stuff of childhood as it might be remembered (and, perhaps, lovingly collected) by a sensitive kid. Comrie has pulled an old tablecloth over his canvas and applied his paint atop it; under his brush, it becomes the backdrop of the piece. Yet all the pigment on the artist’s palette cannot disguise the old-fashioned floral design of the lace. These are the sort of coverings that a great aunt might keep in a cedar chest and pull out for family dinners, and hand-wash in sudsy basins afterward.

Comrie is betting that you, too, may remember household textiles like these. He is expecting you to recognize the inscrutable but comforting body language of ancestors, the holiness of the lived-in world, and the warmth that comes from being around protectors. Through his canvases, he is inviting you to catch up with your forerunners.

“The Immigrant,” by Leandro Comrie.

Many of the pieces in “Things I Remember” capture the fascination and bewilderment of the adult world when seen from a child’s perspective. In “The Immigrant,” a man with a newsprint face performs a card trick, tossing the contents of a deck to the wind. The act seems to beg for interpretation, and the keys he is showing us feel significant, but what we notice most is his tight, composed mouth and the black tear that streaks down his face from his right eye. This figure is a colossus in command of the elements of chance, but he is also overwhelmed by emotion. It is unclear whether he is playing the game or if the game is playing him.

The cards, and the face, are cut-outs, affixed in place and harmonized with the rest of the scene. This is common practice for Comrie, who is forever snipping bits (body parts in particular) from prior pieces and adding them to new ones. Bottom halves of Comrie characters may be years older than the tops. He is forever reviewing his old notebooks and old sketches, snipping bits that might inform what he is currently working on, and fitting faces and bodies like a fellow at a jigsaw puzzle.

Yet “Things I Remember” never quite seems like an exhibition of collage. Instead, it feels like the product of a sustained act of engagement that began somewhere long ago, and continues from canvas to canvas in a relay race of color and shape. The bits and pieces of the everyday that get wadded into Comrie’s work — printed pages, strips of tissue paper, bits of ribbon, muslin, plywood, suggestive blotches of ink — are picked up and balled up by the gravitational force of the artist’s vision. It’s a bit like he is painting with objects.

“The Look,” by Leandro Comrie.

Comrie loves to load up his brush with pigment and deliver thick lines and bright, bulbous shapes. If some beat-up buttons from a thrift store shirt get mixed up in that gesture, he will make sure that they end up somewhere they can signify and, perhaps, make you chuckle. In “The Look,” they settle in the pupils of the deep-set eyes of a furtive and purple-cheeked fellow tucked safely under a helmet. He could be a Central American general. He could be a kid with delusions of grandeur, playing pretend.

In “De la Cuadra,” Comrie collects and arranges wooden sticks suitable for Popsicles in the top right corner of a slab of Masonite. It is neither meticulous nor haphazard: it’s just the ramshackle condition of the world as his central character finds it, and an expression of the emotional weather. That character has tucked himself in the lower half of the panel, curly-headed and knees up, smiling flirtatiously at the viewer. The shutters are on the windows, the protagonist is down on the floor, and Comrie has decorated the wooden frame with arrows and zigzags just to impart a little extra motion to a painting that already leads with its liveliness. The sitter tucks one of his hands beneath his legs and points the big toe of his massive left foot outward while curling the other four out of sight. He is leading us on and holding back; he’s coy and playful, imploring us to investigate further.

A word about Comrie’s hands and feet. They are often as huge as Popeye’s limbs after a spinach binge. They are as expressive, charismatic, craggly and downright humorous in their dispositions as Comrie’s faces. Just like his heads, they are often cut out from prior paintings and affixed to new ones. In the shadowy “Simian,” a piece partially done in charcoal, they are so big they are practically simian.

“Yo No Juego Basketball (I Don’t Play Basketball),” by Leandro Comrie.

The erotic signification of Comrie’s depiction of fingers and toes is impossible to miss, and it would be doing a disservice to the artist and his enthusiasms to refrain from pointing it out. But Comrie also wants to show us people who use their extremities: to walk, to work, to indicate, to emphasize. Comrie’s people have contact with the earth. There is nothing airy about them. They belong to the earth, just as the earth belongs to them.

Where on Earth they are is a different matter. There are clues in “Things I Remember” that point to a tropical setting: somewhere warm, and private, and tucked away from inspection behind a dense line of araguaney trees. This could be peaceful Venezuela as Comrie remembered it, out of reach of the jurisdiction of the United States — a place of safety, magic, folk tales, and adult figures who seemed privy to cosmic secrets. Or it could be the multicultural New Jersey we know, right now — beautiful and confusing, full of mixed signals, crossed wires, complicated personalities, and cryptic references to Latin American literature.

Or it could simply be wherever you are from, long ago, in a place where everything sparkled with the enchantment of newness, surrounded by grownups who felt like gods, and gods who felt close enough to touch — and maybe even laugh at.

Leandro Comrie’s “Things I Remember” can be seen at Guttenberg Arts through June 20. Visit guttenbergarts.org.

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