When you next enter an artist's studio, look down at the floor. Not to the shoes on your feet, but to the peeling lino or the splintered floorboards as, more often than not, they paint a picture of the artist that paces them.
On a fifth-floor walk-up in New York's East Village, through a taffy-stretched entry door, you'll find the studio apartment of Lorenzo Amos, and the paint-splattered floors and walls that colour his practice.
It's here that Amos focused his energies for his first solo exhibition, No Regrets Because You're My Sunshine (24 October–20 December 2024) at Gratin in New York. A new series of paintings capture a catalogue of Amos' friends, other artists, and associates, individually sitting for the artist in his studio, languishing on beds, smoking and shirtless, and immersed in deep thoughts, or their screens.
Amos' scenes recreate his apartment walls in near-mimetic detail. A spray of oil marks dance along the walls, in a freneticism reminiscent of a Twombly. Daubs of paint bleed onto the skirting boards below, before being stomped into the Persian rug covering the ground. These paintings are chaotic, untidy, and tender all at once, evoking the youthful hand and mind that conjures them.
They are obsessive, too; it's the work of an artist putting his knowledge of his subjects—his studio and models—to the test.
At just 22 years old, the self-taught artist has demonstrated with this show his aptitude for masterfully distilling New York's exhilarations with the intimate quietness of the moments it hosts. —[O]
