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Each engaging; each mysterious; each stranger than the next.
He personifies procrastination as a creative force.
Is he the subject of an invisible painter, the painter himself, or an apparition for a painting?
A paper cut-out of an angel adorns the wall, witness to a prayer of desire.
The painting is also a superb topological map of open wounds.
Here is a world without eros, no other.
Dunn does the kind of representational painting that places its subject firmly at the center.
The results feel new.
The Huntis an update of Balthuss ThereseDreaming,from 1938.
In Dunn, we get something cooler, if more graphic.
A young man poses on top of a dresser.
Its drawers are all partly open.
He poses as if throwing his leg over a horse.
His shaved penis and scrotum are seen, center right, and then again in a smaller mirror.
A print of Brueghels Hunters in the Snow can be seen propped up against the dresser.
All the nascent sexuality and guttural taboo of Balthus is thwarted.
Instead, there is a boy looking at himself, or posing as if someyoung Apolloto be looked at.
Downward Dogis a play on a yoga pose and a submissive sexual position.
The former holds his upper abdomen as if he were pregnant.
The latter sits on a wide wooden chair, holding a paintbrush as he combs his fingers through it.
Still Life with Helleborefeatures a beautiful but toxic flower.
It reads like a mirror image of the artist himself.
The coat over the mirror turns the figure into a watching adult.
This kind of doubleness and weird perspective haunts Dunns art.
Finally, inDesktop,we see a character looking down.
Or are we looking over his shoulder, spying, participating, preying?
The figure crouches before an unfinished painting.
Out of it, something peaceful grows.