by Emma Riva
Detail shot from The Star, 2020, oil on mirror.
For Alex Lecce, all art is magic. Their work is from another world. We all live in our own, of course, behind our eyes, but the best artists have the ability to take you into their vision. Lecce’s is unlike any other, blending the personal with the fantastical through sometimes macabre, sometimes dreamlike, sometimes awe-inspiring images. I first became aware of their work through I Am Not He, a massive triptych painting on a thrift store mirror. Many of Lecce’s paintings are on these secondhand mirrors, and they relayed to me how it takes many coats of paint to cover the reflective glass surfaces.
I Am Not He is striking, regal, eerie. An androgynous green figure kneels on a beach, and in either side of the triptych, the. As much as the difference between figuration and abstraction is a mark of what makes an artist’s style, so is the difference between the personal and the imaginative. There’s a sensibility that fantasy can’t be confessional. Lecce’s work proves otherwise.
The first time I saw one of their thrift store mirror paintings I was struck by the way that they used bright, saturated colors. Green is in every one of their paintings, as they state it’s the color of all life and the most significant to them. I Am Not He was a “reclamation” for Lecce of themself—their existence outside of the gender binary, their sense of their art practice, and their understanding of the world.
They studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art but had been drawing for much longer, and kept notebooks from high school into their college studies. I was lucky enough to see Lecce’s sketches, which felt like looking inside of a tome of spells. But the work inside wasn’t fantasy—it was Lecce’s deepest thoughts and meditations during periods of unrest, psychosis, personal strife, abundance, and meditation.
It was coming out of a period of mania and psychosis that allowed them to fully absorb what they were doing with their work. It’s often taboo to talk about mental illness and art in tandem, but it’s also historically true that in the past, people now quantified a mentally ill would have been said to have visions or been possessed. Lecce came out of that period, but from it crystallized what they were doing into elemental “incarnations,” starting with earth and water, then moving into fire in 2025 with Awakened in the Pit. You get the sense, looking at Lecce’s paintings, that you are being trusted with some secret knowledge or led into a portal.
They’ve leaned into the “portal” element of the mirror with more recent works. The artist as a mystic is not a new concept, Hilma af Klint being the most notable. But it’s rare to see a contemporary artist lean into it so much, as so much of contemporary art is restrained and overly twee, and living in a modern world with access to so much knowledge can feel like it reduces access to magic. Lecce’s work feels alive. It breathes from its surfaces. It’s confusing and confronting, as a sketch with a tree growing out from between a figure’s open legs or a faceless creature in the shadows.
To write about art requires personifying it, and I’m of the mind that it’s more honest to approach art criticism and art writing as tapping into unknowable, unspoken essences turned to paint than it is to see it as an academic, art historical act. Though perhaps there is room for both. But I know when I feel a spark, an essence of the beyond within a painting, and I felt it from the first time I saw one of Lecce’s. Lest you find this too woo-woo, I didn’t make it up. William S. Burroughs once said that “It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin.”
Lecce joins a canon of artists whose work I see this personal-infused fantasy in. Danielle Mužina, Alison Blickle, and Naudline Pierre all also tap into this. Art like Lecce’s emphasizes that there is a world beyond paying your bills, scrolling on your phone, or being stuck in traffic. It’s a small sliver of the sublime.
Alex Lecce can be found on Instagram @alex.lecceart.
PETRICHOR 
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