About

Conner O’Leary’s new paintings take us on a road trip from Governors Island to northern New Mexico. Like many who set off in search of the ideal, we arrive to find that there is “Nothing, here.” Yet along the way, there are plenty of things here, assembled in moments that mix the marvelous with the mundane.

O’Leary’s work combines the attention to detail, texture, and light of the Dutch and Flemish painters of the 15th to 17th centuries with the element of surprise that the Surrealists intended to jolt viewers into a critical stance toward “reality,” thus transforming daily life. He revels in …