AGE: 30
BASED: New York
“As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a crayon in my hand,” Leyla Faye tells me. The child of a mime-inspired method actor and a jazz musician, the painter grew up going to a local art center in her hometown of Minneapolis. She remembers looking forward to its annual May Day Parade, for which the community assembled large-scale papier-mâché puppets that would dance down the streets. “The roads would be lined with people,” Faye recalls, “and the puppets would interact directly with the crowd.”
The awe and energy Faye felt back then is at the core of her artistic inquiry today. In works that have made a splash at the likes of Frieze New York and Karma International in Zürich, the artistpays homage to her colorful upbringing—often relying on swaths of papier-mâché to give a sense of dimension and texture to her canvases. “Childhood is a carnivalesque time,” she muses. “Your relationship to the world is still so porous, and there’s less distinction between your body and a bird’s body. … Painting slips me back into that mode.”
Another space from her youth looms large in the painter’s vernacular. Faye’s mother served at a diner, where the artist also worked as a teen before moving to Rhode Island to start a BFA at RISD. Killing time in the restaurant, she would study the regular diners, who became characters of sorts for the nascent artist. “Viewing [them] had a huge influence on me in terms of how I think of persona and identity and the stage—how it all melds into the everyday world,” she says. That exploration plays out in real-time in Faye’s canvases, which depict oversized and almost cartoonish figures, often splayed in acrobatic positions. Composites of fairy tale archetypes, the artist’s memories, and self-portraiture, the bodies on display shape-shift through a theater of emotions, from astonishment to malaise. The work leaves a discomfiting sensation in its wake—a trace of a more innocent age.
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