Art: Wanting to Tell the Truth

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His art tells stories of mutilation and decay. Human and animal forms writhe in agony, ravaged, burning, sometimes headless creatures caught, on canvas and in sculpture, in their final tortured moments. No artist since Goya has been more preoccupied with the portrayal of death than Rico Lebrun. To him, the exploration of mortality is a means of confrontation, and his expressions of "the fright of human flesh" are an attempt to come to terms with the fate of man. And these days, Lebrun is engaged in a private confrontation: at 63, he is suffering from cancer.

Lying on a steel-frame hospital bed in West Los Angeles, mindful of his current show in nearby Newport Beach of painting and of the sculpture that he turned to in recent years, he muses at length about his art. "All my life, I've seen the human form as a container for drama, for all the joy and for all the tragedy, at all times for everything. I think I'd be very upset if I felt I hadn't improved, if I felt I hadn't grown up.

"Sculpture is the most absorbing thing I've ever done. I'll never forget the day my assistant looked up and said, 'What about a cup of coffee?' I said, 'What about lunch instead?' 'What lunch?' he said. 'It's 6 o'clock.' Anyone can see that in the last four or five years I was quieting down, getting richer and quieter in my work: this was sculpture beginning to tap me on the shoulder.

"Sometimes I ask myself, why have I done the figure over and over again, over and over again? Is this a crazy thing to do? I know what the figure should be. Why the hell have I been trying to tell people what they look like? I don't know. I don't know. But it comes down to wanting to tell the truth about something. An artist must tell the truth—that's it."