Sean Landers

Madrid occupies a particular place within Sean Landers’ artistic development: In 2014, during a walk from the Prado Museum through El Retiro Park, he observed the carved markings in the trunks of the park’s trees. This encounter left a lasting impression and became the catalyst of a new body of work, the “Tree Paintings,” introducing the motif of the inscribed tree trunk into his visual vocabulary. The painting Joys and Fears belongs to his most recent series, in which he combines his renowned animal portraits with the carved tree motif to create a new thematic context.

In "Joys and Fears", Sean Landers transforms the motif of the lynx in a nocturnal, full-moon scene into a poetic reflection on transience through his characteristic blend of poetry, self-reflection and subtle irony. In doing so, he artfully weaves in art-historical references—from memento mori traditions to the motif of the forest as a psychological space in Romantic painting. The lynx appears alongside a text that reads like the animal’s inner monologue. The passage situates a single day within a vast cosmic framework—“one rotation of our round Earth as it circles our star on the edge of our galaxy in the infinity of the universe”—and contrasts immediate, lived experience with an almost overwhelming sense of scale. This interplay between the intimate and the universal underscores Landers’ ongoing interest in existential reflection, language as a narrative voice, and the oscillation between humor, vulnerability, and philosophical depth.