Stephanie Deady and the structure of intimacy

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Stephanie Deady’s coolly seductive oil-on-birch paintings now on display at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin – all archly titled, like the show itself, Emotional Calculus – draw you in like mirages of serenity. For that purpose, they incisively deploy beauty: tawny, fluid backgrounds envelop rhythmically interacting shapes of red, blue, or white, lending each package of images visual harmony and compositional stability. In due course, the paintings reveal deeper intent, which is to complicate and enrich your ultimate apprehension of the presumptively simple life. Abstract suggestions of figures indicate two people inhabiting domestic interiors, with eccentric scale and perspective yielding potent articulations of personal dynamics. The series’ first painting reads as a facsimile of a formal portrait of a couple, establishing a frame of reference for the rest, which are distinctly busier save for three that distill human interaction in minimalistic schematics, stressing that every contact leaves a trace that has consequences. The notional room in these paintings is kinetically teeming or calmly haunted, with gradations in between. That’s life.

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The Sienese, an acknowledged influence of Deady’s, eschewed the Florentines’ realism to subjectively explore how paint could convey the intangible. Giorgio Morandi refined this endeavor in the twentieth century, and, in terms of scale and coordination among visual elements, Deady’s paintings are akin to his still-lifes. Her earlier work involved more realistic interiors and indulged a delicate sufficiency of painterly romanticism. Here, she has parted company with firmly representational artists scrutinizing social or sexual dynamics, or solitude per se – Alex Katz, Doron Langberg, Catherine Murphy, and Andrew Shea come to mind – in favor of the unmediated psychic rawness and subdued spectacle of confined interaction. Fully committed to abstract interpretation, Deady has become more attuned to organic forms than geometry. At the same time, there’s a quiet wallop to her work, whose impact is enhanced by a claustrophobic intensity, as Lesley Vance’s early paintings and Liliane Tomasko’s current ones are.

Like Amy Sillman without the slapstick, Deady gets remarkable psychological as well as technical mileage out of trenchant line, a succinct palette, and expressive brushstrokes. In Emotional Calculus 10, apparent limbs overlap, but blue imparts ambivalence, a striated yellow rectangle blankness, thin white lines inevitable if unspecified outside influences. This affect acquires greater resolution in Emotional Calculus 2 and 9, as the subjects separate and slant away. The line is more perturbed and red paint more heavily leveraged in the fourth and seventh paintings, which vibe as agitated and excited, allowing less headspace for fraught contemplation in the moment but maybe more subsequent drama. In Emotional Calculus 3, three sparsely suggestive blue geometric lines cede attention to that strangely gripping tawny background, inflected with small strokes, shadows, and the odd dark splotch. In the sixth work, there are four such lines, three of them red, which make the mood – call it turbulent stillness – marginally more precarious. In number 8, summoning more conscious and deliberate emotion, Deady has laid the tawniness over an elaborate domestic tableau akin to the others, now visibly suppressed.

In the Irish context, there is perhaps osmotic political resonance in Deady’s juxtapositions of proximity and discord, passion and withdrawal, and, to those inclined to extrapolate, that signature color – a little green, a little muddy – could allude to the embattled sanctity of the land in Ireland’s history. Her vision is holistic, though, and not easily amenable to broad contextual dissection. Her paintings project physical closeness and emotional tentativeness, not entirely unlike Edward Hopper’s depictions of couples – Excursion into Philosophy, for instance. But whereas he connected that dissonance to the ambient urban desolation he made iconic, she diligently avoids overt external references, remaining singularly focused on what goes on between two ordinary people free of imminent distraction. With uncannily penetrating visual power and a Beckettian appreciation for the place of the everyday in modernism, Deady gets at the very structure of intimacy.

“Stephanie Deady: Emotional Calculus,” Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Chancery Lane, Dublin, Ireland. Through December 20, 2025.

About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.

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