"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory... Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape." - Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1965)

Miles MacGregor aka EL MAC (b. 1980 Los Angeles, CA) is an internationally renowned artist born and based in Los Angeles. He began painting both smaller indoor works as well as public murals and graffiti in Phoenix in the mid 1990s, and since that time has developed his unique visual aesthetic and rendering style which utilizes repeating contour patterns. His work draws on influences from classical European art, social realism, symbolism and devotional art, as well as the Chicano and Mexican culture he grew up around. He is best known for his meticulous paintings and large-scale murals exploring feminine beauty and honoring ordinary, overlooked, or marginalized people. He has been commissioned to paint all over the world, for museums, universities and other cultural institutions, including the Groeninge Museum (Belgium), San José Museum of Art (California), Northeastern University (Boston), University of California (San Diego), QAGoMA (Brisbane), Fondazione PRADA (Italy), and the Mexican secretariat of Foreign Affairs, as well as murals in Belgium, Cambodia, Cuba, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Morocco, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Viet Nam. For over twenty years he has aimed "to uplift and inspire through careful, perfectionist renderings of both the sublime and the humble".

Commissioned by Related Group
Curated by Primary.
Miami, 2019