Interviews by Brainard Carey

Portrait of Shaun Leonardo, 2024. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
Shaun Leonardo (b. 1979, Queens, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding Black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. Leonardo received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice, and A Blade of Grass. His work is currently included in the traveling group exhibition Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, open now at the Perez Art Museum Miami.

Leonardo’s work has also been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, the Norton Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Queens Museum, the High Line, and the New Museum, and profiled in The New York Times, Artnet News, and CNN. His solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, was presented at MICA, MASS MoCA, and The Bronx Museum, and his first major public art commission, Between Four Freedoms, premiered at Four Freedoms Park Conservancy in 2021. Numerous institutions hold Leonardo’s work in their collections, including the Bowdoin Museum of Art, the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Art Collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Portland Museum of Art, the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Shaun Leonardo, Self-Portrait Icon (Sculpture), 2007. Marble. 24 x 6 x 24 inches (61 x 15.2 x 61 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Shaun Leonardo, Self-Portrait Superhero 4 (Sleeping Giant), 2008. Sign enamel on plywood cutout. 48 x 70 x 3/4 inches (121.9 x 177.8 x 1.9 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Shaun Leonardo, Champ (Mike Tyson), 2014. Charcoal on paper. 76 1/8 x 64 inches (193.4 x 162.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.

Izzy Barber (b. 1990) is originally from Gowanus, Brooklyn, and lives and works in Queens, New York. Barber paints from life: immediacy and physical presence are at the heart of her practice. Working on-site, in public, often at sunset and into the last light of day and night, her highly impressionistic, at times three-dimensional brushwork charges her paintings with the physical and temporal proximity of their making.

Barber earned her MFA from the New York Studio School in 2017 and her BA in Studio Arts & Human Rights from Bard College in 2011. Her exhibition Badlands (2026, Pièce Unique, Massimo De Carlo, Paris) follows her solo exhibitions There Is No Time (2024, James Fuentes, Los Angeles), Waiting Game (2023, Studio d’Arte Raffaelli, Trento), Crude Futures (2022), and Maspeth Moon (2021) (both at James Fuentes, New York). Her work has been shown at James Fuentes, New York; Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; David Zwirner Platform; the New Orleans Arts Center; and the 2012 Brucennial, among other venues. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Publications include Waiting Game (2023) and JFP03: Izzy Barber (2021).

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Clay Pigeons, New York-based artist Izzy Barber’s first exhibition with the gallery, organized in collaboration with James Fuentes.

In an era defined by speed and digital reproduction, Barber remains committed to observation, material experimentation, and the visceral experience of painting from life.

The new body of work includes paintings the artist made during three month-long cross-country road trips taken in 2025 and 2026. Working at the extremities of plein-air painting, Barber placed herself in unfamiliar and, at times, charged environments, allowing direct experience and the inherent limitations of her distinctive practice to shape her work. Her resulting paintings unearth the latent tensions stretching across the empty highways, border walls, and deserts of the United States.

Motivated by a relentless drive for exploration, Barber paints with the heightened visual clarity and charged excitement that come from her physical presence with her subject matter. Working on-site in public spaces, she captures compositions swiftly, painting wet-on-wet and infusing her paintings with a luminous quality, often punctuated by vivid flashes of color. Loose, gestural brushwork and a sensitive rendering of light and shadow combine with moments of sharp structure. Barber’s aim is never the precise replication of the scene before her, but rather to create paintings that capture and distill the full sensory experience of a place as she feels it.

As 2025 began, Barber recognized a profound sense of disconnection from the country, isolated in New York City and consuming news largely alone while staring into a private screen. Out of a need to physically confront our current national reality, Barber went west. The intimately scaled paintings that emerged embody that process of firsthand observation and, when seen together, hold a range of contradictions and complexities that characterize our era. Clear blue skies in Ajo, Arizona, are pierced by the insistent vertical stripes of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Quiet nights in the rural towns of Cedarville, California, and Bassett, Nebraska, are placed in juxtaposition with paintings of armed National Guard troops on the streets of Washington, D.C.

This exhibition does not provide a simplistic or definitive narrative but instead offers a view of one artist’s unfolding, firsthand, impressionistic record of contemporary American life. Engaging directly with the potent subject of the nation’s immigration system, the paintings in Clay Pigeons expand both backward in time and across geographic locations. Connections emerge between paintings of the historic Japanese internment camp site at Tule Lake, California, the active immigrant detention center in El Paso, Texas, and the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. Barber concluded each of her trips by driving back to New York City, at times painting from the passenger seat of a moving vehicle, underscoring the literal ties that connect all of these places.

Izzy Barber, Ajo, AZ (2025), photo: Max Yawney
Izzy Barber, Coronado National Park, US/Mexico (2026) photo: Max Yawney
Izzy Barber, Interstate (2026) photo: Max Yawney

Nick Fusaro (b. 1989) is based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA in Sculpture from Hunter College in 2022 and his BFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2012. His sculptural practice combines humble materials, collections, and iteration to emphasize the effects of memory on lived experience.

Fusaro also studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2011 and is the founder of Three Four Three Four, an artist-run gallery in New York. He has shown at Gordon Robichaux (Manhattan, NY ), Parent Company Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Marwan (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Jupiter Woods (London, UK), Fisher Parrish (Brooklyn, NY), Strobe Gallery (New York, NY) and Long Story Short (New York, NY).

Fusaro has made a habit of drafting new artworks behind a character or archetype when ideating. In this instance, as the exhibition’s title suggests, he has poised himself as The Foreman. The Foreman is an overseer. He doesn’t design or create plans, he simply executes them. He is the figure at the helm of process, navigating projects from renderings to realities. Imagined in the shape of a clown, the character of The Foreman is featured prominently in a panel at the gallery’s back wall, overseeing the exhibition like a construction site. His authority is subtly undercut by his choice of dress, and the delicate safety pin that holds him to the wooden panel. His intention, ability, and capacity are in question, but nevertheless, for better or for worse, it’s The Foreman who is in charge.

Foreman, 2026, 48″ x 48″ (122cm x 122cm) Aluminum Roofing Paint, Felt, Nickel Tacks, Graphite on paper, safety pin, on panel
A Dozen Plus Three, 2026, 23.5″ x 16″ x 4″ ( 60cm x 40cm x 10cm ) Silk-velvet, poplar, aluminum foil
The One Through the Clumsy Hole, 2026, 32″ x 22″ x 18.5″ ( 81cm x 56cm x 47cm ) Poplar, Pine, Plywood, Roofing Nails, Aluminum Roofing Paint, Chestnuts, Railroad Ties, Wire, Custom Plywood Pedestal
Nodules (N_5), 2026, 19″ x 8″ x 8″ ( 48cm x 20cm x 20cm ) Polyester Resin, Epoxy Resin, Insulation Foam

photo by Karla Del Orbe.
Adelisa Selimbašić (b. 1996) is an Italian-Bosnian artist living and working in New York. In 2021, she graduated from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts with a Master’s in Painting. Her pictorial research aims to imagine a world in which the sense of inadequacy does not exist, opening to a nonconventional perception of the body. Through scenes drawn from everyday life and an essential figurative approach, the artist reinterprets the idea of femininity, focusing on the complexities of human experience, desire, tension, and the need for physical contact.

Her practice is based on a dense and almost tactile painterly presence, achieved through careful manipulation of color: working with a contained palette, Selimbašić mixes pigments directly on the canvas, allowing the tones to meet and transform, pushing toward a plasticity that challenges traditional representations of the female body. In recent years, she has presented numerous solo exhibitions in institutional and international gallery contexts.

Among her most recent solo exhibitions: When we become each other, curated by Rebis Rebis (Delfina Pattacini and Gaddo Amunni), Lubov Gallery, New York (2026); The Dancefloor, curated by Michele Spinelli, z2o Sara Zanin, Rome (2026); For My Eyes Only, Manifesto Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo (2025); The Space in Between, curated by Delfina Pattacini, Tommaso Calabro Gallery, Milan (2025); Dust Bunny, curated by Michele Spinelli, z2o Project, Rome (2024); Why Is It So Hard to Declare Yourself?, Galleria Ipercubo, Milan (2023); In parallel, Selimbašić has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Italy and abroad.

installation view Where we become each other, Lubov gallery, curated by Rebis Rebis (Delfina Pattacini and Gaddo Amunni), New York
Tanisha, 2026, oil in canvas, 14x 16 inches
Bay,2026, oil in canvas, 14×16 inches
 

Giulio Noccesi by Ethan James Green
Giulio Noccesi (b. 1996, Florence, Italy) is a painter based in Turin, Italy. He has participated in group exhibitions at Minor Gallery, Copenhagen, DK (2025); Monti8, Rome, IT (2024); Candysnake Gallery, Milan, IT (2024); and D Contemporary Gallery, London, UK (2023). He received a degree in Printmaking from Fine Arts Academy, Florence in 2018.

“In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one…”

– Italo Calvino

In Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, Marco Polo recounts his explorations along the Silk Road to the emperor Kublai Khan, each chapter detailing its own city. Calvino’s non-linear, combinatory prose asks us to think beyond the borders that separate cities, presenting metaphysical themes that are specific to each place described, yet which permeate the text as a whole. We are implored to consider the relationship between history and memory; above all, we must consider how ideas take shape across chapters to form a composite aesthetic experience.

The paintings on view in Fermo per sempre make a similar demand of the viewer. Like Calvino’s postmodern cartography, Giulio Noccesi’s paintings construct a subjective map of his native Italy, an intricate network of isolated yet interrelated scenes. Each painting is simultaneously autonomous and contingent, an intimate, self-contained reflection of his life and a reference to the Italian art historical canon that animates his compositions.

Giulio Noccesi, La tua ex con un altro (Your ex with someone else), 2024. Oil on canvas, 19.75 x 19.75 in (50 x 50 cm). © Giulio Noccesi; Courtesy of New York Life Gallery, NY.
Giulio Noccesi, Paesaggio di campagna (Countryside landscape), 2025. Oil on canvas, 15.75 x 11.75 in (40 x 30 cm). © Giulio Noccesi; Courtesy of New York Life Gallery, NY.
Giulio Noccesi, Renault Scenic, 2024. Oil on canvas, 23.5 x 23.5 in (60 x 60 cm). © Giulio Noccesi; Courtesy of New York Life Gallery, NY.