Journalist Phillip Valys with SouthFlorida.com covers C3: Comics Caricatures Cartoons taking place April 22-24, 2016, featuring internationally-renowned caricature artist and speaker Jota Leal during his first-ever U.S. museum exhibition.
SOURCE: Southflorida.com
By: Phillip Valys
Published: APRIL 20, 2016
Mick Jagger is fat-lipped. The Rolling Stones singer's neck is too scrawny, his body bent into an
impossible "S" shape. Actor Christopher Walken looks like E.T., his eyeballs stretched too far apart,
tucked into alienlike oval sockets. His cheeks, which are missing, make his mouth appear thin and puckered,
as if he's sucking the world's sourest Warhead.
Impish, grotesque, broad-nosed and gangly legged, Jota Leal's surreal caricatures of movie stars and
musicians hang at the Coral Springs Museum of Art for the Venezuelan painter's new exhibit, "About Face."
For Leal, who grew up in the lakeside city of Maracaibo obsessed with American films and music, his warped
visions of Jack Nicholson, Salvador Dali, David Bowie and other A-list luminaries come from a place of
nostalgia and homage, not parody.
Jota Leal and his caricature of Salvador Dali. The painter's new exhibition of portraits, "About Face," is on display now at the Coral
Springs Museum of Art.
"I don't draw caricatures to mock the artists, but to celebrate them," Leal, 39, says. "I want to feel connected
to them through documentaries, music, films. I need to honor that person. My dad passed away five years ago, and every year, on the day he died, I paint a portrait of him. I do the same with celebrities. I only paint the people I love."
If the collection of 30 paintings on display inside the museum's side gallery are evidence, Leal is celebritycrazy.
The painter's caricatures are less hasty sidewalk sketches than bizarre, photorealistic portraits, in which iconic faces are distorted and misshapen as if by funhouse mirrors. There is "The Good, the Bad," Leal's tribute to Clint Eastwood's nameless spaghetti-western character, depicting the gunslinger, a hand cupped around his holstered pistol, staring down the viewer with furrowed eyes and an ultra-thin jaw line.
"He's the good. The person he's looking at is the bad. And the artist who painted him is the ugly," Leal says.
In conversations with Leal this week at the museum, the Houston-based painter is quick to crack wise about
himself and his caricatures. That self-deprecating behavior is what endeared him to Alisa Grodsky, a cocurator for "About Face," who discovered him three years ago at a caricature-artists' convention. Leal, who describes himself as "antisocial," says he was painting a portrait of musician Leonard Cohen ("one of my
favorites") for hundreds of onlookers but ignored the gathered crowd, and instead wore headphones and listened to Cohen's "Hallelujah."
"I usually paint in isolation, so when I'm in a public place, I put on my headphones and forget all the people
there," Leal says. "I always describe painting without music as like dancing without music. You just can't do
it without rhythm."
Leal started drawing at age 8, entranced by the caricaturelike depictions of Humphrey Bogart and Tony
Curtis appearing opposite Bugs Bunny and the Flintstones on Saturday morning cartoons. His first
professional caricature came in 2003, depicting Louis Armstrong blowing a trumpet, his nose flattened, his
puffed-out cheeks resembling a frog's bulging throat.
His caricatures have grown more fantastical. For "Hugo Glass," Leal depicts the titular fur trapper, whose
heroic survival was the subject of the Oscar-winning drama "The Revenant," posing "American Gothic"-style
next to a bear wearing a housedress.
"Some people say caricature is not really art, and that's not true. It's surrealism, and I recognize myself in
that world," Leal says. "Everything is surrealism in caricature, anyway. When I do one, I'm working off a
memory deep in my subconscious. I look at a picture and let it marinate for weeks, until I'm lying in my bed going, 'Oh, my God, I need to paint this now!"
Leal's "About Face" is accompanied by two other comic-themed exhibitions: "Jim Jenkins: The World
According to Jim," a showcase of the illustrator's comic-book illustrations, notably of Doug Funnie, the
beloved character from the 1990s Nickelodeon cartoon "Doug." Angie Jordan will also display her digital caricatures, which are made entirely with iPad drawing apps.
"Jota Leal: About Face" and two other exhibitions will open with a reception 6 p.m. Friday, April 22, at the
Coral Springs Museum of Art, 2855 Coral Springs Drive. A related comic festival, C3: Comics Caricatures
Cartoons, runs 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday, April 24. Admission costs $3-$6, $10 for the festival and $200 for a Jota Leal workshop at 1-4 p.m. April 22 and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. April 23. Call 954-340-5000 or go to
CoralSpringsMuseum.org.