AWESOME!

Paintings by Rob O'Connor.

Opening on Thursday, 23.11.17. From 6 to 9pm.

All other times between Friday, November 24, and Sunday, November 26, 2017, by appointment.

Awesome [adjective]:

1: causing or inducing awe; inspiring anoverwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, or fear.

2: to denote good or excellent. It issomething that teenagers say, because teenagers have such a cool way of sayingthings.

3: pertaining to a shared or collectivepositive experience

Antonym: Sucks.

Growing up I always wanted to be Tintoretto,or Veronese, or Ribero. For better or worse I ended up as me. What attracted meto the baroque and the rococo was their awesomeness. Not so much the scriptural messages but the awesome delivery of them. Even though I don’t believe in the stuff, I have also wanted to make the big and awesome Christian painting. But the market is all dried up. Churches have settled in to a strange type of watered down modernism, which could not in any sense be called awesome.

Raptures, miracles, and religious visionaryexperiences are awesome. You can get similar results from drugs. Hallucinations are awesome. Sneakers are awesome. Music is awesome. Skating is infinitely awesome. Some pizzas are awesome. That kid on youtube dancing to “Livin’ on a prayer” at a Boston Celtics game was awesome. The Scuola Grande di San Rocco is awesome. The attack on the World Trade Center that we have somehow been forced to refer to as 9/11 was awesome.

These works are about communication. There was a man in Hobart, Tasmania, who would stand near Salamanca Market on Saturdays quietly handing out photocopies of his evangelical collages and poems. I am not sure if anyone else was as interested in them as I was. I suspect not. I felt these collaged things were deeply awesome in the second definition. They were exceptional in their crudeness and I appreciated the commitment to his bad craft.

Some things suck, some stuff is awesome. This work treads the line between suckiness and awesomeness.