Cary Kwok is at the opening reception for his new exhibition at Sessions Art Club. He is drinking champagne on the terrace above the restaurant’s stately dining room and watching the patrons below, eating their dinners under the watchful eye of his seductive and charged paintings.
This new body of work, painted over the last few months, is a collection of four paintings and one sculpture. The “usual nostalgia, romance, suspense,” Cary says, with a laugh, when asked what inspired him. There’s a nice frisson to the content of the show, with its muscular men, phallic lampshades and femme fatales, to its placement in Sessions.
It is though, Cary says, simply “suggestive rather than explicit”. It was partly inspired by the glossy, heightened aesthetics of the postmodernist 80s; all De Palma-esque noir and excessive ornamentation. It’s one of Cary’s favourite decades to mine for inspiration, its sense of nostalgic escapism, he suggests, reminds him of his childhood.
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