A series of five front-and-back outdoor paintings on carved sandstone slabs from Catalonia by New York-based Spanish artist Lluís Lleó have landed on Park Avenue. Morpho’s Nest in the Cadmium House, a site-specific installation, parades along the Park Avenue Malls from 52nd to 56th Streets. The 13-foot, 7,000-pound paintings are part of NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program and are presented in conjunction with the Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue and will be on view until July 31, 2017. 

For Lleó, the Park Avenue paintings are an encounter between tradition and modernity, a merger of Catalan Romanesque frescoes and the work of modern American masters such as Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin. With poetic finesse, Lleó carves into the thick and dense sandstone, which he combines with ancestral fresco painting to create a tension between color and form. The title of the work references the morpho butterfly, a beautiful and fragile species found in Mexico and Central and South America.

“These stones are on the one hand a refuge and on the other a protection of fragility, delicate and fleeting,” says Lleó, “They create a place where all our dreams can rest: the hope that the art of painting will not die; and the hope that the art that leaves my studio will be soaked in rainwater and let to dry in the sun, to have the spring breeze blow gently on it. The Cadmium House is that pure place one dreams to find in life. That place where memories lie and we can pay tribute to the art before us, that safe place called history where so many things are unchangeable."

With the installation, Lleó brings objects reserved for interior spaces to an exterior context, altering our perception as observers. One of the painting-sculpture hybrids is juxtaposed with the Seagram Building creating a dialogue with architect Mies van der Rohe. Like van der Rohe’s maxim “structure is spiritual,” Lleó’s work creates transcendent and spiritual encounters by transforming harsh materials into three-dimensional paintings.

“Lleó’s work is delicate and ephemeral-seeming and yet rather intensely concrete, strongly physical,” said art critic Robert Hughes.

Lluís Lleó is the latest in a long list of distinguished artists to exhibit on Park Avenue. Previous exhibitors have included Ewerdt Hilgemann, Alice Aycock, Albert Paley, Rafael Barrios, Deborah Butterfield, Robert Indiana, Jun Kaneko, Will Ryman, Yoshitomo Nara, and George Rickey. To view a history of art on Park Avenue visit the NYC Parks website and The Fund for Park Avenue website. 

Galería Marc Domènech (Barcelona), The Instituto Cervantes, El Institut Ramon Llull, Banc Sabadell, Indus and The Hue collaborated with Lleó on the project.