Julian Kent

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, carefully rendered and tailored to capture the range of his subjects 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, frequently domestic, are compressed and cropped, while small reliefs allude to an outside world. 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.

In his largest work to date, His Little Red Boots, Kent drew inspiration from a scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov where the father returns from his son’s funeral and embraces his child’s tiny boots. The clock in the room’s corner recalls Dreyer’s Ordet, in which the clock stops when the protagonist’s wife passes away. Kent confronts how the experience of time, an uncontrollable force, is easily manipulated by interior states and subjectives realities.

Minus Something juxtaposes restlessness and restfulness, with 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 amorphous, 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.