Cards cats people and stars

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Cards cats people and stars, a project space exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Luke O’Halloran.

Cards cats people and stars offers four suspended observations, articulations of joy and frustration. Some are close, some are very far away. Luke O’Halloran is known for oil on canvas paintings that depict a frozen moment, motion or an instant: slot machines aka “forever spinning wheels”, playing cards adrift mid air, houses of cards in construction and in collapse, magic tricks.

The French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle writes, “As an act, risk lets chance take hold… How is it possible, as a living being to think of risk in terms of life rather than death?”[1]

This new suite of paintings (all works 2022) embraces the futility of certain acts—like building towers out of cards, or observing the unobservable. Two paintings, My Mother building a house of cards and Kellian building a house of cards, demonstrate playful humiliation and hope, a gamble toward something. A feline interloper prolongs the game in a third painting from this series, Kenny building a house of cards.

Likewise, in two other paintings, Cards in the air 13 and SGR A *, O’Halloran renders (in)finite operations—a deck of cards suspended in midair and Sagittarius A*, a site at the center of the Milky Way believed to be a supermassive black hole. In the latter large-scale painting, globs of opalescent white dot a patchwork of swift black brushstrokes—an all-consuming, yet discernibly wondrous portrait of the universe.

Luke O’Halloran (b. 1991, Thousand Oaks, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. O’Halloran received his BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Recent exhibitions White Columns, New York (2022); 8th House, Mexico City (2022); De Boer Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Winter Street Gallery, Martha’s Vineyard (2021); Almine Rech, New York (2021); Kapp Kapp, New York (2020); Y2K Group, New York (2020); and OCDChinatown, New York (2019), among others.

[1] Anne Dufourmantelle, In Praise of Risk (New York: Fordham University, 2011).