Neither the people nor their setting are easily locatable in time and place. Nonetheless, we can piece together a semblance of a narrative from cues in the composition. In the foreground a Botticelli-esque group of ephebes are poised before a red filigreed door like it is the gate to heaven. The figures are languidly arrayed so as to highlight a sense of dramatic possibility that we recognize from the charged compositions of Old Master paintings, which deploy freighted moments to create visual interest. This extends to the figures’ dress, which, while not out of place today, is not clearly tied to the present, but rather, with some exceptions like sunglasses, could be envisioned as taking place in a number of different temporalities. Their garments are as rave ready as they are suited for the agora. The people behind and to their left draw us out of such classicizing impulses with contemporary details like their eyewear and an air of light banter, as if they are assembled in the smoking section of a club. The crepuscular lighting streaming from the streetlamp behind them adds to this, setting a scene that feels like either dusk or, perhaps more likely, dawn. The architecture, for those familiar, resembles—in a generic sense—the kind of nondescript buildings common in Brooklyn, or any contemporary metropolitan center really.
The references to Old Masters are both oblique and direct. For example, in the use of lapis for the skies of several works. Lapis being a traditional material that Renaissance painters mixed into paint to generate rich blues. O’Brien also evinces an interest in Mannerist painting, like that of Bronzino. For example, in the diptych the imagined figures in the middle ground have the elegant, elongated bodies typical of the 17th century style. In O’Brien’s hands this technique becomes a way to evoke, without being simply reducible to (since every generation has its own ways of mediating the corporeal), the distortions that the body is subject to in contemporary society: from looksmaxxing, to injectables, to AI-generated physiognomies. The one-point perspectival recession in this work is just one way that O’Brien organizes space in his canvases. There is, for example, the doubling and cropping of the portrait work, which could only be imagined in a photographic age, and especially our own where images are easily manipulated, cut up and spliced.
Another, small work, plays on exactly such kinds of manipulation, taking a landscape of a train in the woods from a Pissarro painting (in a sense a technologically oriented scene for a 19th century audience) and framing it with a floating, cropped face. If there is a sense of the “surreal” to some of O’Brien’s works, we can imagine this as more about anachronism than imagination. For example, the outdated technology present in the painting of the seated figures. Further, in this work those figures are located on a couch but somehow outside. The video game they are playing runs off of computer tower with a floppy disk drive that appears to be from the 1990s or early 2000s, which resonates with another painting of a petulant teen listening to music on an outdated set of headphones from the same time period.
All this raises the question of why an artist would seek to convey such a sense of being out of time. To address this we must consider the ominous air that the paintings convey, and which links them together as a discrete body of work. If there is a shared theme or through line it is youthful ennui. A sense of impending doom hovers over these figures. Despite this they seem to be willfully ignorant of what is going on around them. To be escaping or evading it, even. For example, in a work which includes a likeness of the artist, a building burns in the background while the figures in the foreground sit placidly as if unaware. This, more than anything, is what locates the paintings in Young Country in the contemporary moment: this sense of their existence in the end times, which the figures in his paintings seem to be waiting out. There is none of the high drama of Michelangelo’s purgatory. O’Brien’s figures have various degrees of engagement, but in no case are they either fleeing or directly engaging with what is unfolding around them, which typically operates at a willful remove. The self-portrait depicts the artist engrossed in taking a picture of a bird with his phone, that device which is the contemporary model par excellence of the classical painterly trope of absorption.
O’Brien’s consideration of these figures and their blasé attitude is even-handed and not accusatory. Instead he simply presents it, leaving it up to the viewer to decide how to interpret what is set before them. This places O’Brien in a lineage of artist observers, of which Goya’s Los caprichos is one of the best known art historical examples. For Goya the issue was to spread awareness about something happening far away in a time before mass media. Now the question is how we manage the inundation of information and also the strict limitations on doing much about it. O’Brien is timely in how he addresses our alienation from the horrors of our moment. This is how we might understand the sense of being out of time in his work. This leads to the sense of waiting and passing time, which is in turn saturated with a sense of ennui. Even when together, they are mostly absorbed in themselves, continuing to dance, play video games, and look at their phones. If apocalypse is nigh in this worldview then O’Brien’s figures are proverbially shrugging their shoulders at the impossibility of doing much in the face of the inevitable.
—Alex Bacon