Mendes Wood DM opens an exhibition of works by Kent O'Connor

Kent O’Connor wanted to make a big figurative landscape painting for a long time. Following this call, he rented a van and set out across eastern Los Angeles to find the ideal location. Time after time, he returned to the same viewpoint, succumbing, at moments, to the basking sun or struggling to emerge after a storm. Working from real life has kept Kent O’Connor prone to the unpredictable yet mesmerized by its freedom. For the artist’s first gallery show in Europe, titled In Dialogue, O’Connor presents a body of work that investigates the concept of narrative paintings or “what it means to paint narration.” In landscape scenes, portraits, still lifes, and drawings that are conceptually connected, what the artist refers to as “narrative qualities” emerge through uncanny nuances. In a fitting coincidence, In Dialogue unfolds in Brussels, barely a stone’s