OPENING RECEPTION: May 21, 5-8PM
OCHI AUX: 3305 West Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
HESSE FLATOW is pleased to present Limina, an exhibition of paintings by the New York-based artist Quentin James McCaffrey. Organized in association with OCHI PROJECTS, this occasion marks his third solo presentation with the gallery, and first in Los Angeles.
McCaffrey’s paintings of domestic interiors combine traditional conventions of still lifes and landscapes into introspective vignettes. These imagined spaces are adorned with decorative flourishes, from floral wallpapers to checkered floors to ornamental vases set atop antique furniture. The absence of inhabitants is intended to place viewers directly within the experience of the work. Through this first-person point of perspective, coupled with an intimacy in scale, McCaffrey’s paintings invite the beholder into quiet moments of contemplative reflection.
As much as his paintings instill a sense of familiarity, they are also at times utterly uncanny. McCaffrey is less concerned with replicating actual spaces; rather, his romanticized constructions extend into territories of the purely symbolic. Throughout his practice, the artist has utilized the trope of the domestic interior to explore the underpinnings of one’s psychological interior, where thoughts and memories are organized and rearranged. Of interest to McCaffrey is how one’s personal histories and understanding of the world may coexist and intertwine in this cerebral place.
Limina brings together recent paintings whose focus centers on a secondary frame, a picture within a picture, which has emerged as a recurring theme in the artist’s work. Here, windows, paintings, and mirrors presenting (at times skewing) scenes from outside the canvas’s edge act as lenses mediating one’s relationship to the external world. Always eschewing specific references, McCaffrey’s subjects appear one degree removed - an idea of something as opposed to the thing itself.
Quentin James McCaffrey received a BA from Taylor University in Upland, IN (2009) and an MFA from The New York Academy of Art (2011). He participated in the 2011 Ippolita Residency in Carrara, Italy and is a recipient of a 2020 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. He has shown work at HESSE FLATOW (NY), Moskowitz Bayse Gallery (CA), Marlborough Gallery (NY), Winter Street Gallery (MA), 1969 Gallery (NY), Trestle Gallery (NY), Flowers Gallery (NY), The University of Maryland Eastern Shore (MD), and many more. McCaffrey lives and works in New York.
