“Echoes of Silence:” The Haunting Beauty of Abstract Art. Remembering Leandro Illescas' Works

FUXIA Insight|REMEMBERING|ILLESCAS' Visual Art Career|by Vito de Candia Levieux

FUXIA by BRI, Toronto, January 28, 2026

“I love my art dig, where I explore the sound of silence,” Illescas once wrote in his diary. It is there—inside that paradox—that his work continues to live. His paintings do not ask to be explained so much as listened to: his colors humming, surfaces vibrating, silence charged. Long after the studio lights have gone dark, the work keeps echoing—an unfinished conversation between life and loss, intensity and stillness, pigment and breath.

Illescas’ Silence, Gesture, and the Alchemy of Color

After college, Leandro Illescas decamped to Rio de Janeiro and spent what he later described as “an impoverished and largely useless year” drifting through the city. Somewhere in that blur of sun, excess, and aimlessness, he stumbled into a love for art. Canada eventually pulled him back—first to a small town in Quebec, where he persuaded a gallery owner to give him a short-lived position as a staff assistant, and then to a studio job in Montreal.

Toronto followed, though never linearly. Illescas would leave and return to the city three times over the years, vanishing for months at a stretch to Argentina, Brazil, or Europe, or slipping away for a couple of weeks to some half-remembered, exotic elsewhere. Movement, for him, was both a creative accelerant and a method of self-reckoning.

Eventually, his inner critic grew louder than the noise around him. Seeking structure, after his studies at Universidad de Buenos Aires, he enrolled in professional upskilling sessions at OCAD University through the Art Gallery of Ontario—motivated by many reasons, including the firm belief that “art studio parties were immeasurably more fun than poetry parties.” Once a heavy partier, Illescas later became sober, slowed his pace, and carved out what he called his “digs”: a personal art studio in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood.

In 2010, an Arts Council grant enabled him to produce what would become his most iconic series. After the exhibition, he pivoted toward film, channeling his visual sensibility into set design. By 2014, he had landed a position as staff visual artist at Netflix, a role he held until his death. Even now, his work continues to surface—new writing of his appeared in the news as recently as this month.

“Why does the art of what we term the Old Masters carry so much more soulful heft than that of most moderns and nearly all of our contemporaries?” Illescas wrote in a Summer 2020 diary essay, composed during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. He traced the difference to what he called “a routine consciousness of mortality,” arguing that artists working in the shadow of death produced work with a gravity often absent from contemporary practice. Moments of rupture, he suggested, force a re-evaluation: “This sort of re-evaluation can happen when events disrupt your life’s habitual ways and means.”

The Visual Practice

The act of beginning a painting is often described as a confrontation with absence: a blank canvas that holds potential but offers no instruction. For Illescas, this condition was defined less by emptiness than by silence. He frequently described silence as the generative ground of his practice, a space from which images emerged gradually, shaped by memory, sensation, and emotional residue. From this quiet, fragments of childhood and adult experience were transmuted into painterly form—an alchemy of affect that brought luminosity to the darker registers of his daily life.

Over the past decade, Illescas’s work evolved from landscape to portraiture and ultimately into abstraction. This progression was accumulative, with each mode leaving traces in the next. His mature paintings coalesced into grotesque abstract compositions, where distortion and excess function as expressive strategies rather than aesthetic provocations. These works engage the viewer cognitively and viscerally, activating sensation through densely layered chromatic fields.

Color functions as both material and affect in Illescas’s work. His palette evokes industrial and elemental materials—iron reds, oxidized copper, cobalt blues, titanium whites, and flashes of silver—set against deep, shadowed grounds. These hues appear to liquefy and collide, suggesting states of pressure, heat, and transformation. His paintings operate less as images than as environments, immersing the viewer in fields of intensity that resist fixed interpretation.

Working out of Parkdale, a neighborhood long steeped in creative crosscurrents, Illescas developed a distinct visual language informed by Argentine and Afro-Canadian lineages. Rather than functioning as overt references, these influences emerge through rhythm, materiality, and compositional tension. As an abstract artist, he consistently occupied the threshold between memory and sensation, allowing form to dissolve in favor of embodied experience.

Cultural Hybridity and Early Influences

Illescas’s paintings were shaped by the cultural density of Toronto’s nightlife and music scenes, absorbing their pulse, velocity, and chromatic excess. Saturated tones and layered textures echo the city’s rhythms, projecting a palpable sense of joie de vivre. Yet beneath this energy, his work returns to introspection and catharsis. Painting functioned as both refuge and reckoning: a space in which internal turbulence could be confronted and transmuted into form.

Raised between Buenos Aires and Northern Quebec, Illescas ultimately adopted Toronto as his adult home. The city became both labyrinth and anchor as he navigated a parallel career as an art director and set designer within the international film industry, while devoting his remaining time to painting in his studio.

His early exposure to Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the New York School, and Afro-Latino tribal art informed his evolving vocabulary. His gestural technique—etching thin, scratch-like lines into dark grounds—suggests both inscription and erasure. Simultaneously, travel across Europe, Brazil, and Argentina instilled a commitment to cultural hybridity, culminating in a visual language that weaves Afro-Latino-Canadian elements into a cohesive, if deliberately unstable, framework.

ELLA, Acqua Series, by "Lean" Leandro ILLescas, Photo Credit: Byron Armstrong 2021

The Studio as Sanctuary

Art functioned as Illescas’s lifeline—a means of confronting and externalizing the forces that unsettled him. In his Parkdale studio, he kept a manuscript of notes layered over drawings, inscribed with one repeated phrase: “I love spending time at my art dig, where I explore the sound of silence.” The statement encapsulates a central tension in his practice, juxtaposing the sensory overload of Toronto’s nightlife with the introspective stillness of the studio. Silence was not absence but a generative condition; his studio became a space where discordant influences converged into moments of harmony.

Within his abstract works, pain undergoes formal transformation rather than narrative disclosure. Gesture, layering, and chromatic intensity function as registers of internal struggle and resolution. The paintings metabolize experience, producing beauty from turbulence. Although Illescas’s life was cut short, his work endures as a sustained inquiry into the transformative capacity of art, a practice that simultaneously confronts and consoles.

Conclusion

“I love my art dig, where I explore the sound of silence,” Illescas once wrote. Indeed, it is in this sentence, in his own words—inside that paradox—that his work continues to resonate. His paintings do not demand explanation so much as attention: his color-hums, surfaces vibrate, silence becomes audible. Long after his studio lights have gone dark, his work persists, an unfinished conversation between life and loss, intensity and stillness, pigment and breath.

Figure: Acqua collection, paintings by “Lean” Leandro iLlescas, Parkdale, Old Toronto, ON, Canada, 2019. Photo Credit: Byron Armstrong 2021

Article Bibliography: 

Ø Critical Reflection, iLlescas's Abstract Artwork, by Vito de Candia-Levieux, RESIST ART Magazine, Vol. 2, page 68-69, Spring 2025, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Ø Leandro iLlescas's manuscript notes (2023 private collection)

Ø  2024 Interviews with Leandro iLlescas’s Toronto colleagues, and his mother, Art Curator and Writer, Diana Rodriguez-Tejerinas.

Ø  Leandro iLlescas's artwork (various private collections and galleries)

Ø  “Lean” Leandro iLlescas, 2019. Photo Credit: Byron Armstrong 2021

Ø  IMDb, Art Director credited by film productions, Leandro Illescas is mainly known for his participation as visual artist in the Netflix series, fictional films Polar (2019), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Cube²: Hypercube (2002). https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1435849/?language=fr-ca 

FUXIA Insight|REMEMBERING|ILLESCAS' Visual Art Career|by Vito de Candia Levieux

FUXIA by BRI, Toronto, January 28, 2026 info@fuxiabybri.com