Conner O’Leary’s paintings can best be described as uneasy still lifes or quiet chaos. The works typically take place in spaces flooded by light and shadows. The spaces feel familiar, like the interior of a home, but the perspective and orientation of the composition causes confusion. Objects float, paintings hang inside paintings, and shadows are long and ominous. Another dimension is created altogether. O'Leary's paintings take stock of the melancholic mundanity and quiet tension which colors our moments (or months) of seclusion, and brings these into focus with photo-realism that hearkens back to the Dutch and Flemish masters.

Since there have been men painting and men writing about them, there has been writing about the suffering of painters. From the black-bile melancholia of the Greeks, to Freudian propositions of loss, art history's magnetic attraction to artistic anguish has maintained itself throughout each diagnostic iteration of what we today call “clinical depression.” The anguish of the Old Masters was rarely explicit in the finished painting as they were often commissioned works, which provides fruitful juxtaposition for Conner O'Leary's approach: utilizing Flemish techniques which capture shadow and texture with such stark grace in order to depict not velvet-draped noblemen but sparse spaces filled only with worn household objects feels like both robbery and sorcery. With the finest of glazed brush strokes, O'Leary trades Van Eyck's doves and prismatic windows for scratched 1980s Baroque reproduction furniture and fly corpses, producing a punk symbolism which pilfers through the observational (O'Leary counts Philip Guston and Avigdor Arikha among his references), the surreal, and the academic to create his quiet, harsh portraits which feature no faces at all (at least—not fully human ones).

Lost Again

20 x 16 inches

Acrylic on Canvas stretched over panel

2023

Painting and Onions

24" x 24"

Acrylic on canvas

2022

A Healthy Winter

30" x 40"

Acrylic on canvas

2022

Magic Hour

30 x 24 inches, framed

Acrylic on Canvas stretched over panel

2023

Vision at the Bar

36 x 30 inches

Acrylic on Canvas stretched over panel

2023

Last Drop

Acrylic on canvas stretched on panel

20 x 16 inches

2023

L.A. Apartment

2023

Acrylic on Canvas Stretched on Panel

30 x 30 inches

Conner O’Leary CV

Exhibitions

2023

NADA House NYC, Martha’s, Austin, Texas

Aspen Invitational, Half Gallery, NYC

Dallas Art Fair, Martha’s, Austin, Texas

Peering In, Solo Exhibition, Martha’s, Austin, Texas

2022

Dallas Art Fair, Martha’s, Austin, Texas

Texan Artist Group Show, group exhibition, Rusha & Co, Los Angeles, California

2021
New Paintings, solo exhibition, Martha's, Austin, Texas

2018

End Times in Babylon, solo exhibition, Mass Gallery, Austin, Texas