Kerry Schuss Gallery

Press Release

Julian Kent  

 

Drama of Silence

 

May 3 - June 22, 2024

  

Deeply cinematic, Julian Kent’s newest body of work explores what one can achieve with one medium, while contemplating another. Following his 2023 debut exhibition at the gallery, these eight new works are larger in scale and marked by a subtle, unifying palette. Kent continues his signature sculptural application of paint with sweeping, directional brush strokes, refined and carefully tailored to capture the range of his subject’s features.

 

A self taught artist, aged only 22, Kent has intuitively uncovered formal and material solutions through making his idiosyncratic work. As Roberta Smith noted in her New York Times review of his first exhibition, Everyday Life, Kent’s paintings “operate as both narrative and objects with utmost efficiency; nothing is wasted or left over.” 

 

For his second solo exhibition at Kerry Schuss Gallery, Kent presents a cast of characters derived from film and literary references, isolated from their source context. Rather than portraiture, the paintings function as portraits of scenes, unveiling a double interiority of both psychological and physical space. The settings, all domestic interiors, are compressed and cropped. Whereas for the subjects, the moments unfolding belong to a mundane continuum, the artist’s act of isolating and reframing them like screen stills elevates the works to the level of drama. Rendered large-scale, they possess a monumental presence.

 

In Barracade Fanatic, a virtuoso pianist alone at home due to his disdain for performing in public, rests briefly after playing a Ravel score, its actual musical notation painted by Kent. Inspired by Thomas Bernhard’s portrayal of Glenn Gould in his novel, "The Loser", Kent was struck by how Gould could play a composition embodying love, while living without intimacy due to his self-imposed solitude. 

 

Minus Something juxtaposes two figures intertwined in bed as one lies wide awake while the other sleeps soundly. Kent’s sensitive portrayal conveys how, in his own words, “touch cannot always assuage what one is feeling inside.” Sometimes the feeling is an unidentified absence that is simply “minus something”, a title borrowed from a SWANS song. Despite this ambiguity, Kent tangibly captures the experience, his brushstrokes and use of color identifying and transmitting what words so often cannot.

 

Across the canvases, Kent’s compositions masterfully suggest the proceeding moment and imply what might follow, an imagined film within Kent’s mind that is the culmination of varied references and experiences. The result is a deeply reflective study of the human condition, universal and palpable, with scenes as captivating as they are silently ordinary.