Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to present Kyle Coniglio, No More I Love You's. This is Coniglio's first solo exhibition with the gallery.
The show takes its title from Annie Lennox's 1995 track "No More I Love You’s" which Coniglio describes as "bitter-sweet and hauntingly mysterious." He refers to the accompanying music video - in which Lennox is surrounded by men in drag performing on a stage back-dropped by a mural sized rococo painting - as a "camp masterpiece." However the title of the show takes on meaning beyond the song itself. Coniglio considers "No More I Love You's" as a poetic statement for the fraught times we are living in, which he embodies through wounded figures and expressions of horror. In addition, the title rubs up against the dominant rhetoric of intimacy in queer figuration. "I'm interested in things going a little wrong, the moments people don't share on Instagram, because as a chronically single person, that's most of my queer experience." Coniglio's sense of humor butts up against his employment of beauty. Often taking cues from 17th and 18th-century European painting, the painter presents his narratives in a fictional world situated between his imagination and Art History.
"I think of my movie night paintings as a franchise, which is an intentionally campy idea," Coniglio says. "For this iteration my figures are watching a horror movie (or the news…). The figure standing in the center is on the phone, which is a reference to Drew Barrymore in Scream (1996) when she picks up the phone and is asked by an ominous voice "What's your favorite scary movie!?" before being chased and stabbed. In the foreground of the painting there is an axe propped up against the wall. The idea is that the figures are in a scary movie themselves, which is just starting to unfold…"
