Matthew Brown is pleased to announce Flame of vapor, a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Kent O’Connor at the gallery’s New York location.

Working across the traditional painting genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life, O’Connor prioritizes deep observation and engagement, emphasizing the essential presence of artist and subject while making his work.

O’Connor’s direct portraits depict friends, family, and himself with an unguarded gaze. Each work takes shape over several prolonged live-sitting sessions with his subject. Through this extended painting process, O’Connor adjusts and refines their features, subtly distorting faces and bodies into deliberate, architectonic forms. The result bears a psychological intensity that extends beyond representation, shaped by time and the artist’s sustained attention.

His landscapes, painted en plein air in Los Angeles, capture the transient nature of place itself. Light shifts, clouds drift, and the environment alters—sometimes permanently, as in Eaton Canyon unfinished, a painting left unfinished after its subject, a home, was lost to the 2025 Eaton Fire. Much like El Greco’s View of Toledo, where cityscape and sky are warped, stretched, and charged with an unnatural intensity, O’Connor’s landscapes have a mannerist quality that resist pure naturalism, favoring the temporal connection to his presence in relation to the landscape.

In an ongoing series of still-life “table paintings,” O’Connor paints objects that accumulate over long periods 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 perspectives, with their own conflicting light sources and scale, blurring distinctions between past and present and disrupting conventional spatial logic. These works function as codices of time spent in the studio, suggesting presence not as a singular moment but as an evolving state.

The paintings and drawings in Flame of vapor are not contained within a single moment; instead, they unfold over time, capturing the slippages and distortions that occur through prolonged observation. These works function less as fixed images and more as durational pieces, revealing the ways in which painting—like memory—warps, erodes, and reconstructs its subjects through the passage of time.