A group of people stand outside a building. The context is ambiguous, the figures androgynous. Neither the people nor their setting are easily locatable in time and place. Nonetheless, we can piece together a semblance of a narrative from cues in the composition. In the foreground a Botticelli-esque group of ephebes are poised before a red filigreed door like it is the gate to heaven. The figures are languidly arrayed so as to highlight a sense of dramatic possibility that we recognize from the charged compositions of Old Master paintings, which deploy freighted moments to create visual interest. This extends to the figures’ dress, which, while not out of place today, is not clearly tied to the present, but rather, with some exceptions like sunglasses, could be envisioned as taking place in a number of different temporalities. Their garments are as rave ready as they are suited for the agora. The people behind and to their left draw us out of such classicizing impulses with contemporary details like their eyewear and an air of light banter, as if they are assembled in the smoking section of a club. The crepuscular lighting streaming from the streetlamp behind them adds to this, setting a scene that feels like either dusk or, perhaps more likely, dawn. The architecture, for those familiar, resembles—in a generic sense—the kind of nondescript buildings common in Brooklyn, or any contemporary metropolitan center really.

The references to Old Masters are both oblique and direct. For example, in the use of lapis for the skies of several works. Lapis being a traditional material that Renaissance painters mixed into paint to generate rich blues. O’Brien also evinces an interest in Mannerist painting, like that of Bronzino, for example, in the diptych the imagined figures in the middle ground have the elegant, elongated bodies typical of the 17th century style. In O’Brien’s hands this technique becomes a way to evoke, without being simply reducible to (since every generation has its own ways of mediating the corporeal), the distortions that the body is subject to in contemporary society: from looksmaxxing, to injectables, to AI-generated physiognomies. The one-point perspectival recession in this work is just one way that O’Brien organizes space in his canvases. There is, for example, the doubling and cropping of the portrait work, which could only be imagined in a photographic age, and especially our own where images are easily manipulated, cut up and spliced.

All this raises the question of why an artist would seek to convey such a sense of being out of time. To address this we must consider the ominous air that the paintings convey, and which links them together as a discrete body of work. If there is a shared theme or through line it is youthful ennui. A sense of impending doom hovers over these figures. Despite this they seem to be willfully ignorant of what is going on around them. To be escaping or evading it, even. For example, in a work which includes a likeness of the artist, a building burns in the background while the figures in the foreground sit placidly as if unaware. This, more than anything, is what locates the paintings in Young Country in the contemporary moment: this sense of their existence in an end times, which the figures in his paintings seem to be waiting out. There is none of the high drama of Michelangelo’s purgatory. O’Brien’s figures have various degrees of engagement, but in no case are they either fleeing nor directly engaging with what is unfolding around them, which typically operates at a willful remove. The self-portrait depicts the artist engrossed in taking a picture of a bird with his phone, that device which is the contemporary model par excellence of the classical painterly trope of absorption.

—Alex Bacon

Artists: Justin Liam O'Brien