Leopoldo Gout’s Wildly Obsessive Creative Life
Leopoldo Gout thinks in color if the rest of us think in black and white. Photos by Cate Cameron.
Leopoldo Gout’s lower Manhattan studio is a hidden world beneath the city. You could never accidentally stumble across it. Tucked behind an unmarked door on Barclay St. and bordering a maze of aging barrels inside one of the largest wine cellars in New York, the place is deliberately unconventional and slightly uncanny.
The space smells of wood, resin, old books, and oil paints — an accumulation of Gout’s many loves scattered in one place. It is here that the otherworldly becomes tangible: paintings that look like photos and photos that look like paintings, layered and sealed between sheets of resin to become sculptures, tables, light fixtures, and even hands.
Gout’s niece, Eloise Dreesen, happens to be my best friend. She brought me to an event at the studio a few years ago, preparing me for a world that even she, his niece, couldn't quite understand. He is the guy that thinks in color if the rest of us think in black and white.
Sure enough, there is a way into his world, and it is through his art. It wasn’t long before I found myself wearing his apron and painting an elephant that evening, entangled in a sea of his larger-than-life paintings and transcendental light sculptures. My guess is that it was exactly the kind of thing the artist wanted — to invite us into the absurdity.
Gout is relentlessly curious, creative, and overly generous. And he tells himself stories in order to live. They come in all shapes and sizes — from Netflix series and horror novels to 15-foot-tall acrylic paintings and limited-edition vinyl albums. Right now, he is weaving a vast tapestry that maps every taco stand in Mexico City. As he draws, he uncovers deeply rooted memories from his childhood in Mexico, like the first time his mother brought him to an ancient pyramid or when she lifted him onto the back of an elephant at the circus.
Here, he shares what it is like to process the past through art, what he does when he finds a story, and why he can’t get this elephant out of his system.
Your work doesn’t have an obvious meaning or easy origins. But clearly it’s intentional and carefully crafted. Can you tell me more about your work and how you create?
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been telling little stories in my head as I draw. I remember being four years old, sketching Vikings with flaming arrows, and being so absorbed in the world I was creating that I started experimenting with matches. I had imagined them as my fiery projectiles. I was so deep in the story I didn’t even notice when our velvet couch caught fire.
When I start creating, it’s like there are little performances and plays going on in my head. I always tell people it’s a little bit like that liminal moment when you're waking from a deep dream, and the dream starts to dissipate and fade away as you’re trying to remember it. But in those few little seconds where you still remember the dream, you’re in a kind of meditative state. That’s what I try to access when I create; it’s my happy place. Those amorphous memories and feelings make up my work.
I lost my home and art studio to a fire in New York City a long time ago. My son was only six months old, and we were basically homeless. It was very traumatizing, and that was the only time in my life that I stopped making art. The only good thing to come of it is that I am no longer attached to objects in the same way. And the thing about art is that you can always create more of it. In the aftermath, I wrote my first novel.
Gout invites studio guests to enter his world by painting with him.
Tell me more about the process of activating memories for you.
With a lot of my work, I react to the materials. By that, I mean that when I start painting or sculpting, I let the materials kind of talk to me, and they trigger these small, atomic memories. I usually use scent memory to trigger those memories — like the scent of a piece of bubblegum beneath my desk from elementary school or the flesh of the bodies in The Raft of the Medusa, my favorite painting. Each memory will trigger another memory, and maybe the materials I’m using will change from painting to sculpture to reflect those layers of thought. I feel a little bit like an archaeologist, digging through these different worlds and uncovering more and more.
Do you find your stories, or do they find you?
As artists, we’re like antennas searching for frequencies. Each of us has our own way of adjusting the signal — kind of like refining the static until we land on something authentic. I’ve always wanted to look at the world, travel it, and eat it alive — which is a good thing because it places me in situations where stories take on a life of their own.
Molly’s Game (2017) is one such example, a project with a deeply personal backstory. In 2006, I found myself at an exclusive bar with my friend, Alejandro Alcocer. When we are together, something always metabolizes into magic. During that time, Molly Bloom was running a very high-end illegal poker game there, and she had these beautiful James Bond types of women trying to lure people to play in her very expensive poker games. It was a surreal moment — on the precipice of a global financial collapse, hedge fund titans and Hollywood elites were recklessly gambling fortunes at a single table. I’ve never cared for poker, but I was fascinated by Molly — an extraordinary woman navigating the aggressively macho poker world. We became friends, and I urged her to leave the game behind and to shape her own narrative instead. She dismissed the idea — she was making millions and thought I was crazy. Then, history played its hand. After her arrest, she called me and said, Let’s do the book. We took the book to Aaron Sorkin, and the story unfolded from there. For me, it’s a similar process to making a painting. I tune into a frequency — an energy, a story, a presence — and back then, it was Molly.
In Gout’s case, it really is the art that imitates life.
The sheer volume of work in your studio is just astounding. Do you have a creative exercise that fuels you?
No, but I’m here almost every day, and I waste a lot of time — which is essential to my process. I think of the studio as a strange kind of garden; ideas take root, grow unpredictably, and sometimes lie dormant. Some days, I arrive, have a coffee, and dive straight in. Other days, I spend hours staring at a wall. And that, too, is productive, because at any moment, through sheer chance, clarity might strike, and I have to be ready. The worst is when I’m on vacation with my family, and I have to step away from my work — I love that my kids are happy, but after three days, I want to scratch my eyeballs out.
I see so many elephants in your work. Do they mean something to you?
My last studio was in a sleek corporate building that was beautiful and fully equipped. But at the time, I needed a change in my space. I wanted something that felt a little more alive. As I was packing to leave, a bucket of paint toppled over, spilling across the floor. When I looked down, the stain had taken the shape of an elephant.
It transported me to this memory I have from when I was seven, visiting the petting zoo with my mom. She lifted me onto the back of a baby elephant — this massive, almost mythical presence to my young eyes, yet impossibly delicate. I remember its skin — rough yet warm — and the weight of its body moving beneath me. I can even smell it. That memory has remained imprinted in my mind, resurfacing again and again in my work. Perhaps because around that time in my life, I had just seen Dumbo, and at that age, I couldn’t fully discern between animation and reality. The idea that an elephant could fly was pure wonder. But beneath the surface, it isn’t really about elephants or animals, at all. I’m obsessed with the idea of something that is incredibly light and elegant, but also heavy at the same time. It’s a contradiction, kind of like magic. My question is, how come?
It’s kind of impossible to represent it without the danger of it being a trope, but I can’t get this elephant out of my system. Recently, in my show at Povos Gallery, I created a series of bronzes using the lost-wax process, and once again, the elephant emerged. These sculptures feel like floating clouds — forms that materialize for an instant before dissolving, much like that original paint spill. In many ways, they are among the strongest works I’ve ever made.
Perhaps another part of it is about confronting this big piece of sadness and grief. My mother is gone, but that splash of paint on the floor brought her back, if only for a moment.
If you look closely, you can see that this table is for dancing.
How did you come to this work, and how have you grown your career to where it is today?
Well, I have a schizophrenic career, and I don’t recommend it to anyone. When I was in my 20s, I was very committed to being a studio artist, and I had a couple of shows in Mexico and New York. I was on a path to success, and then I had that fire, and I lost a lot of my art. That year, I felt crushed. I met a publisher who offered me some money to write my first novel. That book, Ghost Radio, would later have its audiobook narrated by Pedro Pascal. (At the time, his own career was just beginning.)
I was saying yes to everything because I had no other choice. I had a son, a beautiful partner, and the urgent need to provide. One day, David Byrne visited my show at Tricia Collins Gallery in NYC and, out of nowhere, asked if I wanted to collaborate on a music video. My younger brother, Everardo, was directing, and we jumped in without hesitation. That’s how it always is — I fall in love with people and ideas. I could have remained a studio artist, but that moment with David reshaped my path, multiplying my road. And I allowed it.
As an immigrant, I’ve always felt a sense of urgency to say yes to every opportunity. My childhood in Mexico City was filled with curiosity. I remember looking at National Geographic and tracing the vastness of the world with my fingertips, or meeting these extraordinary people that my mother would invite over. She would have these long, meandering lunches that would stretch into the evenings. My life was rich because of the ideas that filled our house and childhood.
And yet, moving between disciplines, between worlds, comes with a cost. I find I never really fit in anywhere. I’m too much of a madman for the art world, and in Hollywood, I’m something else entirely. But I’ve made peace with that — it’s in that in-between space, in the chaos of making, where I thrive.
Earlier, you mentioned that your mom would host these big lunches that really influenced you. What role did she have in your life?
My mom opened my world, literally. She showed me the city underneath the city I was raised in, taking me to the pyramids in Mexico City. I remember once she bought these masks from an indigenous group of women, and the pricing was not about the physical mask but about the rituals behind them. The most expensive masks weren’t the most ornate but the ones that had been danced in the most. It was the injection of ritual that made something worthy. My mother understood that instinctively, and I think that understanding shaped me more profoundly than I realized at the time.
She instilled in me this endless hunger for more life. Even in her 70s, she was leading this prolific life, writing books and making shows on the radio. And if you ask anyone who met her, they’d tell you she had a big impact on them. Even now, her impact lingers. After she died, my siblings and I discovered that she had left behind small packages for us, like bundles of memories. One of mine contained my grade school report cards, spanning from first to sixth grade. Every teacher had written the same thing: Leopoldo is smart, but he’ll never make it. All he cares about is drawing his little doodles and writing his own little stories. And there, at the bottom of each one, was my mother’s signature — bold, big, defiant. As if from beyond, she was saying: Yes, you are that. And I always knew it.
