The latest volume in the Corpus Painting series is the first book in French to feature the American painter Justin Liam O'Brien. This volume unites a very recent series of typically narrative canvasses, mingling the artist's everyday life with iconography from the history of painting. His characters often assume his own features or those of people in his close entourage, and their bodies, with their shapely lines and smooth skin, are painted as colored flat tints, using a straightforward palette with very few effects. The scenes take place in metaphysical spaces, where the decorative elements are as important in themselves as any symbolic meaning they might convey. O'Brien is an avowedly queer artist and as such addresses questions of identity, isolation, sadness and humor in a rapidly changing world.

“So, what does Justin Liam O'Brien's essentially narrative painting seek to tell us? In what or whom does he believe? Perhaps a world of men united by the idea of redemptive love, a queer community of disciples of whom he would be the 'creator'”: portraits of young men, the painter's friends, his intimate community, all linked by the depiction of hands, right down to their fingertips, hands that evoke the rhetorical expressiveness of religious paintings.” Laurent Goumarre (extract from the catalog text)