The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of Fortune Tree, a watercolor and ink drawing by Matt Leines that premiered in Young Lions, a fall 2006 show at Sweden's Galleri Loyal.

As a child growing up in suburban New Jersey, Leines spent the '80s drawing cartoons, playing Nintendo, and creating alternative worlds with action figures. At the Rhode Island School of Design, he applied his childhood fascinations to illustration and soon began selling his work on eBay and in commercial galleries. Leines' career developed quickly and curiously; in 2004, as part of Creative Time's Dreamland project in Coney Island, he helped redesign the signage of a tattoo parlor on Jones Walk, and he has designed a cover for Swindle magazine. A 2006 show at Roberts & Tilton in Los Angeles catapulted the artist into the spotlight, but his biography also includes shows in New York, Athens, and Tokyo.

Referencing ancient history, religion, and mythology, Leines' scenarios are immediately and oddly familiar. Rendered in flat perspective with monastic precision, the bright and stylized images recall Byzantine altars. While a spiky-haired religious leader preaches from an altar in Untitled (The Orator), mystical diamond talikas abound in Diamond Temple, and the mouth of an animal mask reveals the human occupants in Leines' recent work Untitled (Man with Bear Mask). The head of a dark-haired, thickly mustached man lies severed from its body and spurting white, black, and red teardrops in Casualty (Head). The references aren't nostalgic or humorous, however — Leines' tales are as bloody and frightening as the Brothers Grimm. (LM)