In Leo Wellmar’s delicate painting, the landscape becomes extraordinary and magical through the innocence she imparts to it. Bucolic trees, whether scattered or clustered, resemble symbolic and silent self-portraits that navigate between the ambiguity of the familiar and the depths of the soul. Lost in the void, they allow her to break the feeling of absence that her settings might otherwise convey—a space perceived as a threshold between wakefulness and dream.

Wellmar presents an ordered nature, so silent and icy that it stirs the spirit. She designs her compositions using monochromes rich in nuances and subtle gradations to suggest infinity and brush against the transcendental. The artist favors cool, elegant colors with which she creates scenes of calm shaped by pastoral snow. Yet her whites are not merely snowy: they unfold in grisailles, muted greens, browns and earth tones, enhanced by soft, skillfully modeled masses. At times they turn warm, breaking into reds, oranges or burgundies, enough to make us sense a lyrical autumn or winter atmosphere.