Kyle's work fetishizes American iconography. Cars are human, cowboys are boring, and screaming cheetahs are beautiful. Kyle believes painting is a way to purge anxiety and binge self-worth. Shipping pallets and found objects act as canvas stretchers, they’re integral to Kyle's paintings—they operate as dilapidated structures to reflect his ideas about establishment discord, and crashing cultural norms.

 

Kyle Orlando lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is a self taught artist who works primarily in painting and drawing. His most recent works are combines of found objects, canvas, and discarded wooden pallets. In the past, Orlando’s visual language has fluctuated between images of screaming cheetahs; car wrecks; and cowboys. Currently his paintings and drawings mash up, and intertwine those symbols to create singular works. Orlando’s works feed on personal feelings of anxiety attributed to notions of exclusivity i.e. being on the “outside,” and wondering what it would be like on the“inside.” His works can be seen as some sort of personal catharsis, but his hope is that viewers will garner their own interpretations.

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Interview with Kyle Orlando

What do your paintings reveal about
your personality?

Depending on the piece or body of work, I
hope it shows my anxieties, stress,
depression, OCD, and other emotions/
mental health struggles. All of those things
play into my personality in one way or
another.

What do people misunderstand about
your art the most?

Hmmm, I'm not too sure. I would say, maybe
if you're thinking too hard to understand or to
like something you should move on to
something else, not every piece is going to
resonate with everyone, even if they're a fan

of the work.

Who are your biggest artistic influences?

At this point, there are so many and I would probably forget a
bunch of them. I will say that I like to pull influence from

everywhere...people, places, things, shows, films etc.

 

Do you sketch first and then paint? If yes, do you sketch

on paper or digitally?

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Well, I draw a lot, daily really, usually while watching something
on TV. But those drawings are not pre-planned ideas for
paintings, rather I see them as their own work. Of course, over
time a drawing might heavily influence a painting, and other
times maybe just pieces of a drawing end up in a painting. And
the paintings also find their way to influence drawings. They're
2 parts of the same whole, they work separately but are of

course always with one another.

 

I'm very interested in the texture of your artwork. Do you
layer paint on top of each other?

Some paintings are very layered and heavily worked and
others are not so caked on. This is just based on how things
work out as they're being made. Everything is done intuitively,
therefore, some things take lots of working out issues, and
others speak for themselves a bit quicker.