This week in Newly Reviewed, it’s Walker Mimms on Andrew Wyeth, Zoë Hopkins on Truong Cong Tung and Arthur Lubow on Kyle Dunn.
Kyle Dunn
Through Sept. 1. Wadsworth Atheneum, 600 Main Street, Hartford;
860-278-2670, thewadsworth.org.
Decaying fruit is a venerable subject for artists, but in Kyle Dunn’s up-to-date version, pears bear supermarket stickers alongside brown spots. Equally of-the-moment: Many of the recent paintings in Dunn’s first museum show cast a tender gaze on an idealized boyfriend in tableaus of queer domesticity.
A young New York-based painter who shows at P·P·O·W, where six of 11 works in this exhibition were on view last year, Dunn harks back to a previous generation of gay artists, including Paul Cadmus, Jared French and George Tooker, who themselves looked to the Italian Renaissance to find inspiration for their glorified renderings of the male body.
Dunn’s field of reference is broad, ranging from “The Legend of Zelda” video games to Pieter Bruegel the Elder (whose “Hunters in the Snow” is quoted here in the 2022 painting “The Hunt”). He takes infectious, virtuosic pleasure in capturing the way light refracts in a cocktail glass or glows from an iPhone.
This hyper-realistic style lends itself to Surrealism. In “Sea Bell” (2024), a framed painting of a heron devouring a small fish, which hangs on a wall, resonates with a frog chasing a moth over the torso of a naked, sleeping young man. The view is through a door frame (over which a giant moth is resting) and behind it, a window frames the red orb of a sun in a sky that appears awfully dark for sunset. An empty frame outside the doorway supports a chained bell. Frame upon frame upon frame. Life is but a dream.