BORTUSK LEER'S MONSTERS ARE OUT THERE When it comes to bogeymaning their way into art history MONSTERS have form. Hieronymous Bosch’s hybrids are creepy critters. Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ isn’t nice (first painted on the side of his house btw!). There’s also ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’, by which he meant… It’s complicated. Proselytising for enlightenment values could invite interest from the Spanish Inquisition in those days. Henry Fuseli’s squatting horror of an incubus must be what it’s like to wake up with Nigel Farage sitting on your chest. And Francis Bacon’s Furies, those three grey haggis with necks and teeth are surely the last thing you went loitering at the base of your crucifixion.

Debuffet’s outsider art, art brut – taking inspiration from street scribblers, the insane, eccentrics, as well as the art of children – also springs to mind when considering the work of our latest flyingleaps collaborator. It’s a privilege to welcome the irrepressible Bortusk Leer into the fold. The artist had already taken steps to populate the street with paste up rave pigeons when his mum dug out some childhood drawings and the monster motif was born. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. Like some visual equivalent of Bach’s musical variations, Leer’s monster theme is a fount of invention.

Bortusk Leer Street Monsters

  ‘Is this the sign you’ve been looking for?’, ‘Keep fuckin smiling’ and ‘Love every day’ is a boggle eyed, buck-toothed, dribbling gum bleed of a triptych. Leer creates monsters in various media but the trio of new flyingleaps posters echo his own forays into the street where he pastes up sheets of newsprint of single monsters holding up signs.

The messages literally signalled range from the profane to free advice on well-being. Beyond that the colours, inventive compositions, the graphic energy and gurning expressions convey an anarchic joie de vivre that’s contagious. Leer’s public workshops are hugely popular with kids and adults alike. Sometimes only minutes in the making, watching the artist devise a new monster it seems that their appearance is as much a surprise to him as anyone else. Their creation is a mischievous performance of discovery and fun.

Displayed in the street Leer’s monsters assume the role of urban jesters, mocking the attention seeking consumer spectacle. Spray painted and marker penned on top of the daily news, obliterating pages of The Sun or Telegraph, etc., they also imply a mocking attitude toward the constant stream of distraction offered up by the mainstream media. But most of all they bring a smile to people’s faces. And that is a generous gift, especially during a global pandemic. As it says on the artist’s Insta. bio. ‘Art’s not serious, being dead is.’