A house lit up in the dark, a lone figure at the window, a lawn turning almost black as the sun sets. The paintings of American artist Leonard Koscianski portray the American suburbs as a place where nothing ever seems to happen, and that’s exactly why anything could.

Born in Cleveland in 1952, and trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later at the University of California, Davis, where he studied under Wayne Thiebaud, Koscianski has spent years exploring the same subject from different angles. Residential neighborhoods, manicured lawns, swimming pools, distant churches, populated by couples, morning runners, kids kicking a ball around. These scenes look ordinary enough. But his is a quasi-surreal suburbia, where psychological tension seeps into the orderly geometry of tract housing.

The reference to Edward Hopper comes naturally, and it’s the artist himself who cites him among his influences, alongside Grant Wood, as models for a way of loading everyday scenes with emotion. Like Hopper, Leonard Koscianski builds his atmospheres around light, slices of windows glowing in the dark, backlighting that isolates a figure, skies shifting from midnight blue to a scorched orange dawn.

As for perspective, his work often plays with angled, slightly distant viewpoints, a gaze that watches the neighborhood from above or from the side, as if the painter himself were a neighbor peering over from his own backyard. It’s a choice that reinforces the sense of voyeurism running through his entire body of work, the observer is inside the scene and yet excluded from it, much like the characters he paints seem to live side by side without ever really meeting.

There’s also a more explicitly conceptual side to his practice. Koscianski identifies with Critical Postmodern Art, a current that in the 1980s looked at the dark side of postmodern culture, the suburbs, alienation, television, while still holding onto a craftsman’s attention to skill that sets it apart from the more ironic, detached strain of postmodernism.

The more you look at Leonard Koscianski’s work, the clearer it becomes that his suburbia is never one specific place, it’s an archetype, one we might find just around the corner from our own homes.