JOHN O'REILLY: RECENT MONTAGE
By VINCE ALETTI
Published: July 25, 2011
The artist’s meticulously constructed photocollages have the feverish, chaotic, slightly mad quality of transcribed dreams. Dedicated to Marsden Hartley, Hart Crane, Nijinsky, and C. P. Cavafy and alluding to countless other classical, literary, and art-historical sources, the work is also intensely personal and enthusiastically erotic. Vintage snapshots and scraps of gay porn are layered with images of a Renaissance angel’s wings or a Greek bronze head in collages that strike a perfect balance between raunchy and refined. O’Reilly seems to be rooting around in civilization’s ruins and rearranging them into fragile but enduring monuments to the restorative power of the imagination.
Through July 29.