Anthony Cudahy paints narratively elusive images of queer intimacy and tenderness within everyday life. His work interweaves myriad symbols and references ranging from queer archives, art history, mythology, print ephemera, even fragments from his own paintings. While these references coalesce with a logic personal and idiosyncratic to the artist, his open-ended narratives gesture to the gradual accumulation of meaning within the flotsam of our own lives.    

metronome yawned brings together new and recent works that cumulatively meditate on the slipperiness of time—how it’s felt compared to how it’s ordered, how a life is measured relative to the milestones that are collectively yet spuriously held up as markers of progress, or how specific instances of mundanity can unexpectedly and irreversibly punctuate the cadence of a life.  

The exhibition’s starting point is a selection of works on paper from a series entitled Like Night Needs Morning. A constellation of figures—some based on Cudahy’s close relationships, others culled from archives and images of crowds—rest, contemplate, embrace, and entangle their way through each hour of the day amidst allegorical gestures to cycles of life and death, light and dark. Like a recollection of a dream upon waking, certain details are rendered with precision, whereas others dissolve into aqueous washes of colour and form.  

Dusk and Dawn (with Perspective Machine) depicts two male figures in repose, separated by a wood-framed grid reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer’s drawing frame—a device the German Renaissance artist famously used to aid in accurately rendering perspective. Here, however, the grid becomes a sort of time machine, warping time, perspective, and reality instead of ordering it. In contrast, two new paintings offer prolonged glimpses of specific, quiet moments within the everyday. One image implying tension, the other release, both paintings dwell in the time after what came before.  

Colour, space, and the materiality of paint all possess narrative potential in Cudahy’s work, as potent and revelatory as figurative details. His colour palette is equal measures abundant, exuberant, acerbic, romantic, and draws our attention to unexpected places: a glint of caustic green across a brow bone, a wash of magenta beneath the crest of a back, a curl of rust along a lavender jawline. Of these observations Cudahy has said: “There are entire worlds in subtle saturation or value shifts.”1 Indeed, for Cudahy, painting is often a process rooted in attunement to the nuances and complexities of the everyday. By lingering in these quiet moments, time seems to expand and contract.

1 Hannah Silver, “The mundane meets the sacred in Anthony Cudahy’s richly drawn figures,” Wallpaper Magazine, 18 October 2023. https://www.wallpaper.com/art/exhibitions-shows/the-mundane-meets-the-sacred-in-anthony-cudahy-richly-drawn-figures