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As part of SEASONS 21: TONIGHT AT NOON, C L E A R I N G presented Henry Curchod’s first solo exhibition, Rome is no longer in Rome, in Los Angeles. 
On a night of waxing crescent quiet, his immersive world of impulse and atmosphere unfolded.

The first thing you see is a painting of umbrellas — bent, chaotic, crammed onto a discount rack. €35 is crossed out. Then €25. Then €15. 
Finally, €10 — ringed in mossy green, like a visual shout. The stack leans right; on the left, black slashes pull the image sideways, like it’s slipping out a side door. 
You’ve just arrived, but the forecast is clear. So is the transaction. You’re not here to observe. You’re here to buy a cheap umbrella. Because something is about to pour.



It’s a tone-setter for Rome is no longer in Rome, Henry Curchod’s first solo show at C L E A R I N G Los Angeles. The title is melancholic, almost absurd — and like the work, it suggests dislocation.
Rome — as metaphor for grandeur or history — is gone.

Though Curchod lives and works in London, his paintings unfold in a space both personal and borderless —
part myth, part mime, part subconscious stage.

We’re somewhere else now. A dream suburb. A cul-de-sac of memory and impulse. You’re stepping into a Curchodian weather system. Emotional barometers. Freudian crosswinds. Subconscious storms.

I told a stranger at the show that Curchod’s work isn’t meant to be understood.
“But did you feel anything?”
They paused.
“Yeah. It was grand.”

And there it was. Buying a painting — or engaging with it, even — isn’t about face value.
You do it because it makes you feel something you can’t replicate anywhere else. Power comes from presence, not pretense.

Take, for instance, a painting of a child suckling directly from a cow’s udder. It’s jarring at first. The cow stands mythic and still. The child, earnest. Not mocking. Not mischievous. Just there — in communion with something ancient and wet, something unspeakably alive. The palette reminded me of Certified Lover Boy — that emoji-colored Drake album cover. Cheery at first glance, but artificial underneath. Like nursery colors under emotional duress. Mars dirt under a haze of fruit-flavored vape. The scene teeters somewhere between Charlotte’s Web and a medieval altarpiece hallucinated during a fevered farm dream. Not quite satire, not quite fable. A gesture caught between instinct and myth.



Look closer, and the technique pulls you deeper. The cropping is intentional: animals truncated so the viewer fixates on legs and udders — details that might otherwise recede. The lower third of the canvas acts like a graphic base, a flattened groundplane that doesn’t recede but stages the action above. It reads almost like a set: theatrical, symbolic. Space doesn’t follow natural perspective — it stacks, floats, suspends. The child’s body is subtly distorted: limbs elongated, proportions skewed, reinforcing the image as symbolic, not literal.

This is Henry Curchod’s zone: where candy meets flesh, where innocence edges into the perverse.

The colors — ochres, chalky pinks, acid yellows, swampy greens — feel like memories: dream-toned, heat-warped, unreal. Paint sits loose on the surface. Edges blur. Brushstrokes bleed over outlines or hover beside them, echoing subconscious gesture. There’s no photorealism here, but the conviction is total. Even the hooves, sharply outlined like cartoons, don’t ground the figure.
They float inside a dissolving background. It’s not a physical world.
It’s emotional — humid, tactile, half-remembered.

That same raw communion — messy, mystical, unresolved — recurs across his work. Even when the subject gets strange, the paintings never flinch.

These are not paintings to decode, but to sit with. They hold you in something slow and unresolving — something like grief, or memory, or yearning. You look because you don’t know what else to do with the feeling.

He paints with little to no underdrawing. The images come from itch, dream logic intact. This looseness connects him to the inner child — a figure that performs, jokes, bites.

That reverence for impulse expands outward, forming a larger Curchodian universe — a stage of psychic slapstick and visual riddles. A donkey tails a horse. A man limps through green haze. A trio of chefs pantomime. Each scene feels half-sketched, half-summoned.

Then: two cops. Hips cocked, baton slapping like a prop from a failed drag routine.



They carry the erotic tension of a 21 Jump Street bromance turned sour. But here, the homoeroticism doesn’t resolve into comedy — it curdles. Not camp, but surveillance in costume. Like the undercover-cop movie where teenage angst meets state power in leather jackets and locker room jokes, Curchod reroutes that energy into something provocative yet withholding — a pas de deux where the joke stalls out mid-punchline.

The composition locks in. That red brick wall isn’t just a backdrop, but a blockade, flattening perspective like a stage wing. It pins the figures forward, as if trapped in their own theater. But even that solidity starts to falter. The bricks, grid-like at first, begin to blur and dissolve toward the edges — less architecture than atmosphere, like a Francis Bacon wall melting into static. The claustrophobia evokes Beckmann’s theatrical interiors, while the soft outlines and chalky, subdued palette pull from late Guston — less grotesque rebellion than nervous hesitation. Cartoon linework. Tender color. Too soft for satire, too anxious for resolve.

Red and blue dominate — police colors, yes, but also a child’s idea of conflict. Not balance, but binary. Not contrast, but collision. They smear, bleed, and blur, mimicking both state power and playground allegiance. This tonal compression — juvenile and charged — is emotional delay: a theater of masculine authority, performed half-limp, half-late.

His world is moody and childlike. The paintings feel like glorified butcher-paper drawings — the kind done on tablecloths at an Italian restaurant. Crayon next to the olive oil. Red, green, and blue. His palette nods to Katherine Bradford’s dreamscapes and Juliano-Villani’s overloads — but Curchod’s compositions hesitate, lingering in emotional static.

The gallery’s layout added to that atmosphere. Curchod designed a series of rugs for the space — soft, diagrammatic zones that gently interrupted foot traffic. Viewers stepped around them at first, unsure, then began brushing shoulders, crossing paths, unintentionally close. The effect was subtle but potent — a choreography of strangers in quiet orbit. Another gesture toward intimacy, unspoken and strange.

In the broader field of figurative painting, he holds his own beside Ana Benaroya, Robin F. Williams, and others twisting cartoon-realism into painterly psychodrama — Juliano-Villani among them, but with the saturation dialed down and the atmosphere dialed up.

We never needed Rome. Just an umbrella.


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