Justin Liam O’Brien Loves NYC

by jacquin cunningham

Justin Liam O’Brien’s studio is in a brownstone at the bottom of Bed Stuy on the first floor. I walked into the front room which smelled softly of oil paint or those old windows in apartments with so many layers of paint they chip off. It’s bright white with a dial molded light in the center of the room and track lighting casting an unflinching glare down onto the works in process on his walls. In one corner, the vinyl album cover art for Julio Torres’s Problemista soundtrack sits propped up against the wall, rendered in acid vibrancy which sort of yells for attention, since the other works on the wall cast a more, as O’Brien put it, “dour,” mood right now. But that’s not to say that the space is sullen, and the painter certainly isn’t. He opened his front door with a wide smile and was wearing a tight fitting black shirt, grayish twill trousers which a friend said lift his ass (which is true) and gorpy shoes he’s glad fashion has caught up to. For the first five or so minutes of talking I stood next to his easel without a chair as he sat on what became and increasingly rickety wooden box which bent as O’Brien became animated, laughed, and asking me where I got the baguette pen I used to always bring to interviews as a little performance. I said, “Well I’m a faguette with a baguette,” and took a seat.

I got the pen in an awful little shop called Friends NYC for $5 underneath a building full of studios in East Williamsburg—or as I think of it, the SEY Autonomous Zone. “Those studios are beautiful,” says O’Brien, who used to have a studio near there on Gratton Street and surviving on chicken ceases wraps from the deli. “It used to be like a bunch of kooky booky, older Bushwick people’s galleries, and over the last 10 years it’s just sort of become private studios because those people weren’t making any money; which is sad since a lot of the community there isn’t local anymore. It’s just way more suited for like individual artists who are selling paintings at bigger, more commercial galleries.” Back then,  he would see “all the divas,” AKA painters Amanda Ba (as seen in PISS 1), Sasha Gordon, and Dominque Fung, who all still circulate in the area.

What’s immediately clear from five minutes of conversation with him is that O’Brien loves New York City as just as much as Italian painters. After the baguette bit died down, Justin pointed to a painting. “I think that painting is so weird. It’s by Andrea Mantegna. It’s crazy. I love stupidity. I think stupidity is great. It’s the only thing that keeps me alive. Don’t you think so?” I held up the pen in agreement. “It’s vital. Capital V vital,” he says, sounding a whole lot like Diana Vreeland, who in a television interview once shouted with great enthusiasm; “Money is VITAL!” There’s something poignant about Justin’s love of 15th century High Renaissance masters and their stupid, semi-orgasmic biblical scenes and the current art industry he is participating as we sat surrounded by large and medium-sized pieces destined for a Semiose Gallery booth at Art Brussels in late April. Ideas of patronage have again shifted away from the local as artists search for a “nowness” in an ever more globalized market and reckon with an audience increasingly in search of the fast satisfaction of easy to consume work as they scroll through Instagram. Painting, he points out, “has always been about capital,” arising from the growth of the liberal market and availability of material which replaced the more finicky egg tempera. O’Brien’s compositions straddle these questions, working themselves out across complex planes filled with figures softly caught in a moment of feeling. As we speak, Surafel, a portrait of one of the artist’s friends in front of a brownstone and pink cloudy sky, looks down at him in a silent acknowledgment of his presence in the room. On the wall looking at me is A pair, where Cameron Schuessler (a New York based stylist and DJ) rests her head on Jacob Weinzettel (of Composite) and watches my eyes, inviting me to look deeper into hers.

Theseintermittent gazes are like something out of Sally Potter’s Orlando, where Tilda Swinton grapples with the meaning of life after she changes gender while emulating other writers as her bread and butter. As he read the book, O’Brien felt more and more the pain of its titular character who only after great struggle realizes that she doesn’t need to frame her writing around the language of others in order to have something to say. “All of these Italian and Spanish painters, painters from the ‘40s like Cadmus—I had such an urge to emulate and bring them into the present.” But like Orlando, Justin has tired of transposition as a medium. “I feel like I’m at this point now where I want to reach beyond figures.” At the heart of this is a question of what on earth is even real these days in an era plagued by the policing of authenticity and an obsession with “truth;” but, “there’s so much that can happen in a painting to make you think that it’s real,” argues O’Brien. Take one of the artist’s favorite paintings by Piero Della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ, with its amusing depiction of Christ’s beating something of an afterthought in the background, with the main event comprising three unknown men in conversation paying the scene behind no mind. There’s a lot of conjecture about who the three men are; some believe it’s an allegory of Muslim invasion after the Council of Florence in 1438 when the Byzantine Emperor sought protection from Murad II and left without aid; others say it commemorates the death of two prominent sons of Mantua. O’Brien prefers the version where Oddantanio da Montefeltro, ruler of Urbino, is surrounded in the foreground by advisors who were all murdered in a conspiracy. The commissioner was Montefeltro’s brother, Federigo, who may have hidden a message about his innocence in the matter by comparing his suspected guilt to the flagellation of the innocent Christ as being wrongly perpetrated against him.

This kind of veiled messaging interests the artist now, who out of his twenties, is ready for a more layered approach. A painting of two men playing video games against the Manhattan skyline with a dog perched at their feet sits up against the wall to O’Brien’s left. “There is actually a whole other painting beneath it,” he says. “If the paint is going to crack and fall off, then so be it.” Pointing out the eyes and mouths still visible under the figure’s current iterations, he highlights the living possibilities of oil paint itself: “Built into an oil painting is this sort of mortality; it’s like a temporary image.” Indeed, there are paintings from the last century with unset oils under layers of application which cracks in response to its changing environments to reveal its making. “Everyone’s really obsessed with things being forever,” he says gesturing across the shifted composition as if plotting his next move.

It’sin these future cracks that O’Brien now stores things about himself that he used to divulge in bars.  “In my 20s I was a little bit more diabolical, and when I would meet people, I would tell them very personal things about myself to kind of get a sense of how they would respond.” His work used to do that (in a more subtle way) too—2023’s Only One Way really does look like a 21st century Cadmus, replete with swim jock looking out to sea, various focus points, with an limp wrist added just so you know they’re gay. O’Brien was, I think, responding to an idea about performing identity on the canvas which he has very much left behind. “I realized in my later 20s that’s kind of sociopathic,” referring to his bar-side confessions, “People aren’t things that you should play with and test to see if they can tolerate your bullshit.” But it all has to go somewhere, the secret histories, sexual fantasies, longing, pain, and desire, doesn’t it? The answer, of course, was yes. “I started just doing that in my paintings,” like his version of The Last Supper, a massive unfinished dinner scene from what was something of a last supper for O’Brien, an ex at its center. Far and away from his new reality, memories upstate can play out infinitely on canvas as the artist turn his gaze to the city and who remains.

For O’Brien, New York will always be his mise-en-scene. It is The Ideal City to him. But he’ll be the first to admit that there is more trouble in paradise than when he arrived from eastern Long Island just over a decade ago. He’s watched as its art world has turned self-indulgently abstracted from the human. “The narcissism of thinking the world is going to end is so masturbatory,” and partly because it allows those in the New York art world to opt out of art’s entanglement with the environment in which it is created and is displayed. “Making a painting is a self-gratifying act, but you’re giving somebody a picture to look at, too.” These acts of reciprocity are what O’Brien feels is missing from the way collectors engage with art and New York’s creative scene engages with a city facing increasing difficulty as rents and prices soar under a Mayor who seems to care more about licking the fake tan off Donald Trump’s bellybutton than tackle venture capital-led housing cost inflation. “I get super cynical about the paintings as a vehicle for fucking investment, but the people that buy my work are earnestly interested,” a change of pace exemplified by a studio visit by a prominent gay media figure who spoke to the artist at length about the value of sharing master works in his home. The irony in that statement, I’m sure, is clear: rich white gay guy buys expensive art for rich friends to look at... sure! Putting that to the side for a moment, what O’Brien is really speaking to is the universal power of a painted picture to connect people together across time and space. From the cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc to the Tell Asmar Hoard of ancient Sumer, these imagined human forms link iconographies; it is as simple as closing your eve yes in front of of a work to imagine how the clothes felt on the subject’s back; how the hands of their lover felt in their hair. You don’t get that from a banana taped to the wall, do you? So, with his priorities in order, the painter is ready to explore the symbology of the city he calls home. “I want to make weird pictures about New York City,” he says, looking comforted in the admission.

Like Fran Leibowitz, O’Brien, “Can’t live in any other place,” and expects he will die here—but not before he votes Eric Adams out of office.  It may be something of an inspiration that New York is experiencing a second Tammany Hall-style era of political intrigue that’s gone from an open secret to daily reality. “I just like to keep thinking about the Weimar Republic and this hedonism. It’s a moment of escapism into hedonism.” At the same time that the New York creative scene is reverting to dispassionate aestheticism, a call to action in responding to the time. “Take care of people and stop being so self-indulgent,” he says, seeing this manifest in his work not in depictions of specific queer third places like Basement, but in instances of connection that evoke the uniting nature of the city beyond time. And it’s not all Cheers; O’Brien is intent on confronting the way that the city cannibalizes those younger than him too. Since he moved in 2013, the city has grown more into its reputation as Gotham, a place that chews up and spits out new residents into its vomitorium masquerading behind a Williamsburg wine tasting. The 20 somethings he knows are, says O’Brien, “looking towards a future without jobs, student loan debt, and just thinking ‘What the fuck are we supposed to do.?’ I’m sitting over here with my BFA, successful art career, and a couple of other friends who are a writer, make furniture. My friends are looking at each other, like, ‘What are we going to do with our fucking younger friends here?’” It’s easy to romanticize the city of the 70s as a cheap artist’s paradise to masturbate over on the way to fame. It’s that promise of an accessible underground with a side of finance that attracts young people still. Mapplethorpe and Candy Darling were from Massapequa, David Wojnarowicz was from Red Bank, NJ; Peter Hujar grew up in Newark. “It’s a romantic city and it’s a tough city. It’s a very hard city,” says the painter. “But when you’ve come here, you should be punished for sitting on your ass and thinking you can become the next version of those people.”

go out and do things for your community; that’s the city I’m gonna paint about because that’s what the city is right now to me.