Scott Marvel Cassidy 

Maria

October 23rd - Nov 20th, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday October 23rd, 5 - 8 pm

In Scott Marvel Cassidy’s still lifes and portraits, life is funny, tragic, boring, sloppy, slow, quiet, beautiful. His subdued tableaux train a meditative gaze on loved ones and belongings. The subjects are modest, familiar—a tangled lock of hair, a refrigerator, aged cheeses—all rendered with a flat, affectionate warmth and deadpan humor. Cassidy’s brush keeps a devotional focus on domestic mess, transforming the banal into something mythic. Here are our grubby, crowded living and workspaces, glancing moments with the people we love. We should really clean today but we probably won’t.

 Dirty pans and utensils are stacked on a glistening stovetop; mops lean against a messy studio sink, torn rags crooked around its rim. The artist’s wife Maria’s blonde hair peeks out of a wrinkled blanket decorated with paisley flowers. Fridge doors are left ajar with the familiar accoutrements: fruit, two cabbages, a jar of pickles, and several cans of White Claw. Cassidy, who lives and works in Los Angeles, describes his painting process as a form of meditation. He uses sable brushes to remove painterly artifacts and capture every possible detail of a scene with crystalline clarity. Cassidy writes that this “overworking” is “a way to honor my obsessive tendencies and emotional distance.”

 This obsession with affective representation places Cassidy in a lineage of representational painters such as Fairfield Porter, Mamma Andersson and Lucien Freud, whose careful moderation between closeness and distance achieved what Freud called an “intensification of reality.” Uniquely in Cassidy’s work, this intensification takes on a wry, American tone. His paintings notice and reveal the painful comedy of living.

WORKS