Feb 6th, 2026​

PRESS RELEASE for Brandon's solo show at McLennon Pen Co. Gallery. I've spent years living with these paintings, watching as Brandon planned them, stretched linen over stretchers, agonized over palettes. Our home is full of these characters, like ghosts, or totems. It felt good to gel all the thoughts and feelings I've had about these works into something cohesive:

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Brandon Campos: Group Scene

February 20 - March 14, 2026

Detail of Brandon Campos, Green Curtains, 2025, Oil on linen, 48 x 40 inches

Opening Reception: Friday, February 20, 2026, 6–9 PM
February 20 – March 14, 2026

 

Brandon Campos’ first solo exhibition, Group Scene features a collection of oil paintings, some of which are populated with the artist’s family, friends, and strangers, while others are void of any human presence: empty living rooms, bedrooms, and dining tables. Pulling from his own personal pictures and old family albums, photographs become a vehicle by which Campos erects something else entirely, works from which emanate a tender intimacy, linking the dreamy and the mundane.

 

In this series, Campos employs his painterly skills to render scenes as an unreliable narrator, where features are incoherent, details softened to impressions, and others remain sharp as a blade: a Doberman’s chain collar, a marble tabletop, the collar of a dress, the whites of a woman’s eyes. Meditating on themes of legacy, abandonment, photography and memory, he interprets the collective identity of family and selfhood as atmospheric images both strange and familiar. 

 

In Couch, a sofa sits empty, a floor length curtain drapes the background. The scene is vacant, painted in purple-blue hues, the patterns on the couch blurred as though a haze has settled over the room. A table sits in the foreground, a camera flash reflecting off its surface, highlights creating a mirror-like effect. Using a limited palette of alizarin crimson, French ultramarine blue, raw umber, yellow ochre, and titanium white, Campos conjures a feeling of cool detachment. Throughout the collection are other abandoned rooms: a red and yellow bedroom, a dining room table set for dinner, a green chair. These works invite the viewer to project their own memories, filling the empty seats with friends and lovers, a stage on which they can place themselves.

 

Other paintings are teeming with figures, some smiling, laughing, others indecipherable, their features smeared, lost to the background. In Group Scene, a group of young people sit together, life-sized. The tableau falls in and out of focus, creating a distorted effect that mimics memory, where details become slippery, blurred beyond recognition and open to interpretation. In Denio’s, Campos paints a crowd of church women posing at a weekend get-together, a scene from his wife’s childhood, rows of faces painted in the grotesque discernment of dreams. 

 

Also on view are paintings of Campos’ closest maternal figureheads, zoomed-in portraits of two women, their faces filling the entire space with a sense of emotional nausea. Green Head is painted in a sickly viridian, the skin shining and alien, the eyes bright as lasers. Blue Head hearkens back to Picasso’s Blue Period, an image consumed with melancholy. At such close range, the paintings are intimate and disquieting; rendered as religious icons they become familiar as Mary Magdelena, full of agony and honesty.

 

By turns lonely and crowded, these paintings express both playfulness and grief, unspooling the material of memory. Group Scene weaves between reality and fantasy, prodding the crux of fiction and truth, where images play out between minute detail and foggy perception. 

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Brandon Campos (b. 1995, Austin, Texas) is an Austin-based artist. From 2013 to 2018, he trained under apprenticeship with British painter Edward Povey. His work has been presented in group exhibitions at Commerce Gallery, Lockhart, TX (2024), and dodomu Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2023). Campos has also painted a mural for Pieous Restaurant in Austin, Texas. His work is held in the private collection of Dave Matthews, Charlottesville, Virginia.

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