Robert O'Connor: Ahhhh - The Good Old Days

 In this latest body of work, O’Connor turns to the genre of still life, staging scenes drawn from deli counters and 1980s nostalgia. The works draw a line from 17th-century Northern European painting to commercial food styling, collapsing devotional imagery into the aesthetics of aspirational consumer culture and kitschy Australiana.

The imagery is sourced from a particular moment of 1980s commercial cookbook photography that projected nostalgia for a stable, past order that never quite existed. The paintings revel in the camp artifice of their source material while exposing its falseness. Materially, the works operate at two extremes: matte and high gloss. Some surfaces absorb light; others are sealed beneath resin. Both serve to obscure the mark making and human- touch. The gesture echoes the natural resins of Dutch Golden Age painting, but also the impulse to preserve and laminate — to protect something so thoroughly that it becomes permanently fixed, immobilized, and ruined.

Set against false memories of deli counters and barbeques and other things that also never happened, these paintings ask what is at stake when we look at painted abundance. If still life has historically been a meditation on mortality and transience, O’Connor’s version situates that meditation within the aesthetics of mass production and lifestyle aspiration.

Ahhhhh, the good old days considers painting as simulacrum: an image of an image of an image — a surface that promises authenticity while insisting on its own artificiality.