Leo Arnold on painting as archeology

On an afternoon in early March, I journeyed from Soho to Bloomsbury to see Leo Arnold’s new exhibition ‘Saccades’. The artist found me over-caffeinated and jittery, smoking perched on a piece of scaffolding outside of Brunette Coleman. Possibly recognising my unusual alertness, he too ran to get a coffee and once our caffeine levels matched, we entered. Brunette Coleman is one of those galleries that has cultivated the perfect quiet for absorbing painting, fortified against the barrage of noise and energy that floods the city, with a certain frequency in the air that tugs and pulls secrets from the depths of paintings.

‘Saccades’ features four large scale paintings by Arnold entitled Eurostar 1 (Schoten), Eurostar 2 (Folkestone), Eurostar 3 (s’-Gravendeel) and Eurostar 4 (Brasschaat), all made between 2024-2025. The works depict landscape scenes through the Eurostar window between Amsterdam, where Arnold lives and works, and London, the artist’s family home. Jo Baer’s two drawings, Hinges (1964) and Untitled (1961), are hung quietly, punctuating Arnold’s paintings. Though Arnold’s large and saturated panels of emotional expression dominated the room, what I was first struck by was the precision and intricacy of Baer’s works. Arnold was the late American minimalist’s final assistant before she died this year. “We did a show when she was alive, and I didn’t notice the pair of tits on the top of the columns,” Arnold says, pointing to Untitled (1961). “I worked for her for a couple of years, up until she died on the 21st of January. I was surprised at how hard it hit me, because I knew when I took up working with her that it was near the end.”

Arnold was quick to explain that although there are some formal connections between his and Baer’s works, “I’m not sure how much they have to do with each other”. “Today, it feels like every show needs to have conceptual rigor, but for me it’s a personal thing having her in the show. This is about my life, and this is the closing of this chapter with Jo. It’s really special to honour that with some of her work.” Without realising it, Arnold had declared the true investigation of the exhibition: one of emotional processing and the issue of how to present that purely and visually.

The two met when Baer was doing a show at the Kröller-Müller Museum and she had just fired her assistant “in a very Jo way”. Arnold explains that “Jo was like Mr. Burns [from The Simpsons]. She was tough. She was famously difficult. She fired her assistant and asked the museum if they knew anyone and another artist suggested it to me. They got in touch and it really fell into my lap. When I turned up I was a bit scared of her, within a month she fired me as well.” I digested this with a side smile as I instantly recognised Baer as a rockstar. “I remember it perfectly. She sent an email that said ‘Don’t come in tomorrow. Your work is no good for me’.” Eventually one of Baer’s carers (Arnold explained that Baer was suffering with dementia towards the end of her life), encouraged her to give Arnold a chance, so she invited him back. “I tried a different approach where we would put up a canvas on the wall and begin [working on it] before she could doubt it. And then she would say ‘Oh, make that blue, make that green, and so on’. Suddenly we could work and then the rest is history”.

Though each painting has clearly been worked into and onto, reanalysed and rebuilt over a period of time, I was struck by their immediacy: as though the landscape had been scanned live through the Eurostar window and printed directly onto the wall, capturing not a perfect description but a brain’s attempt to consolidate everything speeding past. Arnold explains that “when it’s finished, I want it to feel that it was one moment, even if that’s false. I want it to feel like a whole experience.”

The results are a reification of the act of looking out of a car window. It’s a behaviour we can all relate to and one I’ve carried with me throughout life. The pensive act of watching the world pass through glass, for me, is anchored across various emotional memories. It originated in childhood, when I was sitting in the back of my mum’s car as the sun set across moving fields, stretching shadows of ancient trees into long dancing patterns, a 2000s anthem blasting via Magic FM, and me, lip-syncing in secrecy to enact the music video I’d constructed in my mind.

The act is frequently depicted in film and is inherent to the materiality of that medium. Painting, however, is static. It is a brave act to attempt to make a painting move. More often than not I find a lack of material ambition within painting. The process of experimenting with the fabric of paint, the painter as magician, is slowly disappearing. In the absence of the skills and knowledge pertaining to visual illusionism, we now over intellectualise dead works to imbue them with lost substance. However, in ‘Saccades’ Arnold declares his complete understanding of the purity of painting.

His paintings’ lack of subject specificity and overt emotion means we can imprint our own emotional landscapes onto Arnold’s paysage of the European countryside. Just like the superimposed reflection of oneself in a window, we are able to reflect ourselves onto the works. This is a rare feat, and something all abstract painters reach for. Arnold recognises this and explains that “the abstract qualities of a painting are more important in the end. But I need a subject, I need to have ideas. I tried to paint purely abstract paintings, and I can’t do it because I can’t keep belief in the work. I just lose my self belief as I’m going – I’m like ‘what is this mess?’”

In Eurostar 2 (Folkestone), Eurostar 3 (s’-Gravendeel) and Eurostar 4 (Brasschaat), Arnold has rejected the translucent quality of glass and instead flattened the picture plane. Reflections of light become entities of their own, rather than reflections of another and pull you around the room. I am most taken by the technical handling of the painted reflections of fluorescent lights. As I walked up close to Eurostar 4 (Brasschaat), the illuminated beam of light dissolved into dull colours. Somehow through instinctive colour theory, Arnold has enabled a muddied burgundy to ping out of the painting as illuminated light. Arnold is clearly investigating the viscosity and tactility of paint, choosing a palette knife and his fingers over a traditional brush.

The exhibition title ‘Saccade’ means the rapid movement of both eyes between various focal points. It’s an everyday human behaviour but, when brought into the realm of painting, it forced me to question how I look at work. I couldn’t work out if I see paintings as a whole, or if my eye darts around them. Throughout the interview, this niggled peripherally, making me question not just what I was looking at, but how I was looking. Arnold thought “it would be an interesting thing to do, draw your eye to your mind when you’re looking”. Across all aspects of his exhibition, there is a constant amalgamation of what you’re seeing and how you internally process that.

I realised, as I pirouetted around the gallery, guided by the stark horizontal beams of reflected fluorescent lights, that Arnold understands the theatricality of curation. He has created in essence a ‘diorama theatre’, a 19th century theatre-art hybrid that featured a rotating auditorium moving between different large, dramatised tableaux paintings, activated with lights and special effects. Some refer to the concept as the main precursor to cinema. It’s hard to make paintings reach outwards, to get them to affect the space they occupy. This is the first time paintings have forced me to dance.

I suddenly realised we had spent the whole time in the main room of the gallery and hadn’t spoken about Eurostar 1 (Schoten) hung in the office. I caught a glimpse of the painting on entering and was captured by its allure. It felt like reading the last page of a newly purchased novel, revealing a fragment of a closing situation without its whole context. Entering this room now felt intrusive, as though the painting was trying to protect itself from viewing. But, now that I had ‘read the novel’, the painting opened itself up to me. Arnold tells me it was the first work he started, and the last to be completed. The other works are thick with viscosity and saturation, whereas Eurostar 1 (Schoten) preserves the translucency of the window. It is melting and dripping, reminding me of a bus window in the pouring rain, refracting swashes of light as vast colour panes. It was fat and oozing, yet fading, or becoming: an entity caught between realms, a figure attempting to manifest.

Painting for Arnold is archeology: the canvas becomes both the dig site and the museum, “It’s like choosing where to excavate, and then the painting is the digging” he explains. The whole exhibition feels like a messy pile of emotional puzzle pieces, one never intended to be pieced together. Instead, the works wash over you as fragments of artefacts leaving the viewer grappling and questioning, desperate to find meaning and/or respite. Activating desire within a viewer is the key to longevity. Arnold has been both generous and mischievous with what he offers us: questions without answers.