CURA.

In Jack O’Brien’s artistic discourse, forms are stretched, pulled, and pushed to their limits, evoking suggestive and unusual encounters between surfaces and images, structures and spaces, the organic and the industrial. Found objects (mostly building components or designed for industrial production, with a predilection for musical instruments) and repurposed materials (metals, fabric, glass, clothes, etc.) are combined into ambiguous assemblages through a process of meticulous associations. The result is a body of work imbued with a sensual energy on the verge of collapse; metallic elements seem generated from one another or, conversely, detach due to precarious junctions, evading and challenging the conventional logic of the ready-made. An erotic tension between these reconfigurations unfurls with precariousness and haptic expectation; it’s a palpable and distorted kinkiness enhanced by a sense of lightness and legibility that still persists in the objects, in their relation to material histories and needs.

As if suspended in moments of silence where minimal gestures coexist and eerily hold different forms together, O’Brien’s sculptural works evoke a sense of organic impression while leading to a surface fascinatingly and obstinately anchored to an aseptic, cold, industrial, and mechanical realm. This premise was nearly evident at Frieze London in 2023, where he won the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize with a solo booth presented by Ginny on Frederick. On this occasion, a 19th-century wooden horse carriage was wrapped almost entirely in cellophane (Volent, 2023). “By wrapping objects, I’m trying to evoke an ornamental symbolism that resembles cranial, bodily, masculine physiologies, revealing physical complexity and challenging a particularly rigid idea of masculinity,” reveals the artist.^[1] Suggesting both protection and suffocation, this wrapping gesture resonates with me also as a means to elicit, through industrial materials, a natural phenomenon—a spider’s web or a membrane in which an insect or an animal has taken possession of an object, a body, a trunk. Volent was formally and conceptually in dialogue with A tyrant called love is coming (2023), a photographic print on aluminum from the series Cherry (2021–present), featuring an enlarged cherry—the pop and sensual icon par excellence—tweaked with soft pastel and spray paint. Covered with a mirroring layer of heat-formed PETG plastic, this work incorporates an industrial fan positioned in the fleshy part of the cherry—visually alluding to a bruised section of the fruit—, along with a scaffolding band rolled up like a silkworm cocoon. In a circular symmetry, these two works trigger a metamorphosis inside their bodies and on their surfaces; the metaphorical manifestation of the natural and physical event is here phagocytized by layers of industrial coatings that mimic organic phenomena, processes, forms, and attitudes within the materiality of consumer society.

The approach to destabilize the fixed nature of objects unfurls additional poetic folds in some of O’Brien’s latest assemblages, highlighting a degree of ‘machinic animism,’ as if some of the works were expanding themselves through mechanical crystallizations—by breathing, binding, squeezing, penetrating, etc.—and progressive germinations, cold yet extremely erotic. Take, for example, Wishbone (2024), recently exhibited in Cascade (2025), his debut solo show at Capitain Petzel, Berlin. Composed of a horn standing at a 90-degree angle from the wall and a spiral hanging out from it, the sculpture culminates with ten teaspoons slipped between the spiral loops, in a state of movement in motionlessness. It resembles an organ with an orifice and dripping liquid, a mouth with a tongue, or a flower caught in the act of blooming. Or consider Interlude (2025), a composition of two joined street lamps, with a steel coil protruding from each like pupils or inner pushing forces, all wrapped in stockinette partially marked by black spray paint. Mimicking organic forms through the use of industrial materials and commercial objects, these works are at once fluid and malleable, yet interrupted in their movement, caught in the act of exhaling and suffering. A similar larval state is majestically condensed in the pair of horizontally twisted, stockinette-wrapped spiral staircases presented for The Reward (2024), O’Brien’s solo show at Camden Art Centre, London. Alluding to drilling, this installation has a clear erotic charge, evoked by some decorative chrome spheres, also wrapped, clinging to the stairs like pods, eggs, or chrysalises, and by some strips of stockinette that fall to the floor: remnants of an organic membrane, an umbilical cord abandoned by a deceased organism.

Jack O’Brien’s practice extends into abstraction with an expansive lightness that challenges notions of form, function, and physical boundaries. It also curiously winks at works in which ornament and decoration are queerly filtered through the lens of melancholy and camp, as in Marc Camille Chaimowicz, where these modes “blend with a romantic and cerebral approach to gesture and materiality.”^[2] This sensibility leads to a sensuality that reveals its power in the eroticism of restraint and the ebb and flow of bodies and objects, organically and industrially abandoned to their desires and rhythms. O’Brien’s work seems to validate that there is no division between natural and artificial, no separation between machines and bodies. “This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages.”^[3]