Kyle Dunn’s paintings are a tour de force and a tour of art history. I remember Dunn telling us a few years ago, “As I work half-autobiographically and half-fictitiously, sometimes people assume that what I am painting is one hundred percent earnest, when it is really leaning into fantasy or cathartic bombast. So, while autobiographical in origin, they are more about blowing those feelings up past life-size, to the point of comedy or tragedy.” Perhaps I think of a tragic emotion in Dunn’s work, the estrangement of lovers or the loneliness of modernity, but through a modernist and classical style, Dunn is opening up a whole universe of possibilities of cinematic painting.
