In February of 2026 I travelled from Los Angeles to Verona for exhibitions at Studio La Citta, and Deposito À. Over dinner, in Piazza San Zeno, Francesco Sutton and I agreed to a Solo exhibition in May that would consist of new paintings and the projection of my film project, Between Hope and Alameda, made in Los Angeles in collaboration with Heather Seybolt, and three portraits inspired by the film.

Traveling by train from Verona to Porto, where I have a studio, I stopped in Madrid to visit the Prado. After waiting on-line in the rain for an hour, fortunately shielded by an umbrella, the melancholia was overwhelming. I was aware that it was my brother’s birthday, the first since his death. Being under an umbrella in the rain turned out to be the perfect mise-en-scene for that day; tears blending with rainfall.

« Il pleure dans mon cœur / Comme il pleut sur la ville » Paul Verlaine

While inside the Prado, I spent 7 hours drawing, moving intuitively from painting to painting, sketching only the background trees, mise-en-scene to the forefront drama, noting their relationship and function within the overall paintings. I have been drawing background trees in museums for many years, but only now have I felt the urge to turn them into paintings. The first decision was to maintain the exact dimensions or ratios of the original ones.

Background to the Backgrounds

I grew up as an artist seeing the trees in Los Angeles, usually treated as background images, and bringing them to the forefront. In making them the primary subject for my art, I imagined re-instating the dignity trees once had as an equivalent or emblem of the divine.

After dignifying these common trees as the subject for a kind of portraiture in oil paint, the possibility of producing an 8mm film came up. The imaginary script would cast marginalized background trees as the “stars” and the urban environment as the “extras”, reversing the usually shared perception of Los Angeles one sees on the screen.

The tree is now the “star”, but there are perilous issues with fame. In Los Angeles, my personal history of growing up in the film and tv industry with a famous father, and later famous brother were complex. In 2001, when I started painting beleaguered roadside trees, one surprising by-product was that people started telling me about the unique and mis-shaped trees they had seen.

My friend, the artist Lawrence Carroll, suggested I show my tree paintings to Claudia Gian Ferrari in her gallery in Milano. When Claudia saw them, she said, “It’s a tree, but it’s like a person…but trees are better than people!”

Lawrence also introduced me to Hélène de Franchis and Studio La Citta.

Of course, there’s nothing new about bringing the background of a painting to the forefront. Braque had this beautiful notion when he invented Cubism, trying to overcome the dominance of Renaissance single point perspective in effect for 400 years and return to a forgotten, medieval and so called ‘primitive’ approach.

Over 25 years of painting marginalized background trees as forefront images, I looked further into the background of those backgrounds. what is that space? I grew up in the shadow of conceptual art, but I don’t consider myself a conceptual artist. This is the representational content of this body of work that I decided to title ‘Renaissance

Luicas Reiner
Porto, May 2026