Matthew Brown is happy to announce Flame of Vapor, a solo exhibition of recent work and drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Kent O’Connor on the gallery’s New York location. Working throughout the normal portray genres of portraiture, panorama, and nonetheless life, O’Connor prioritizes deep remark and engagement, emphasizing the important presence of artist and topic whereas making his work.
O’Connor’s direct portraits depict buddies, household, and himself with an unguarded gaze. Every work takes form over a number of extended live-sitting periods together with his topic. Via this prolonged portray course of, O’Connor adjusts and refines their options, subtly distorting faces and our bodies into deliberate, architectonic kinds. The end result bears a psychological depth that extends past illustration, formed by time and the artist’s sustained consideration.
His landscapes, painted en plein air in Los Angeles, seize the transient nature of place itself. Gentle shifts, clouds drift, and the atmosphere alters—generally completely, as in Eaton Canyon Unfinished, a portray left unfinished after its topic, a house, was misplaced to the 2025 Eaton Fireplace. Very similar to El Greco’s View of Toledo, the place cityscape and sky are warped, stretched, and charged with an unnatural depth, O’Connor’s landscapes have a mannerist high quality that resist pure naturalism, favoring the temporal connection to his presence in relation to the panorama.
In an ongoing collection of still-life “desk work,” O’Connor paints objects that accumulate over lengthy intervals of time in his studio. Recurring motifs—a plastic colander, lemons, a bust of Michelangelo’s David, a zebra’s head, a stemmed rose—exist in layered views, with their very own conflicting gentle sources and scale, blurring distinctions between previous and current and disrupting typical spatial logic. These works operate as codices of time spent within the studio, suggesting presence not as a singular second however as an evolving state.
The work and drawings in Flame of Vapor should not contained inside a single second; as a substitute, they unfold over time, capturing the slippages and distortions that happen by extended remark. These works operate much less as fastened pictures and extra as durational items, revealing the methods wherein portray—like reminiscence—warps, erodes, and reconstructs its topics by the passage of time.
