Exhibition

Kyle Coniglio
Painter
Nov. 17, 2023 - Jan. 6, 2024

Louis Buhl & Co. is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Kyle Coniglio, titled Painter and opening November 17th, 2023. Coniglio creates fictional images that serve as a platform for exploring his emotional experiences. The exhibition will showcase new paintings that pay homage to the various influences in Coniglio’s practice.

Coniglio’s practice is rooted in fiction building, relying on assembled narratives and the desire to tell a story as a guide for his decision making. In these efforts, the featured body of work looks to the figure of the painter as a jumping-off point. Indicating the conceptual studies of his subject are the scenes’ settings—either in the studio or en plein air—, further embellished by objects strewn about the compositions such as paint brushes, palettes, easels and smocks. The paintings are not self-portraits, though autobiographical hints are contained within each figure, whether a reference to Coniglio’s studio habits or a distant reflection of his own work space.  Across the series, Coniglio references formal cues of Western painting through his emotive use of light and color, recognizing their potential to invoke a sense of atmosphere and time of day, as well as the theatrical and the spiritual. The two elements are significant organizing principles of the compositions, where a miasmic use of monochromatic hues and the fabricated illusions of haze evoke a palpable heat that aids a sensorial viewing experience. 

The intentional use of light and color further fosters Coniglio’s camp sensibility as he subverts art-historical norms through a queer point of view, reinterpreting the lush drama of his Renaissance and Baroque influences. The works fetishize an over-the-top aesthetic that celebrates extravagance and creates a space where playfulness and reverence can exist in symbiotic harmony. The kitschy style is enforced through the subtle inclusion of artifice objects such as a hot pink landline telephone or a disco ball. Overtly, the aesthetic is most readily apparent in Drag Queen, which illustrates a drag queen painting his makeup at a vanity, his presence overtaken by the grandeur of his royal blue gown. The painting—mainly its subjective focus on the dress—is a modern take on Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, one of Coniglio’s favorite paintings which he notes to be one of the only in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Baroque Wing created by a female artist. Invested in concepts of beauty and reference, he draws comparisons between drag culture and that of the modern painter in the way both rely on icons of the past or present to inform their creative endeavors. 

Kyle Coniglio: Painter is on view from November 17th, 2023 through January 6th, 2024 at Louis Buhl & Co.