Timothy Siciliano:
The Lunch Before the Détente

January 17 - February 28, 2026

Opening reception: Saturday, January 17th, 5-7pm
Artist talk: Saturday, February 14th, 3-4pm


studio e is thrilled to present The Lunch Before the Détente, an exhibition of new works by Timothy Siciliano. Building elaborate scenes of war generals and dominatrixes surrounded by lavish flower bouquets and lit cigarettes, The Lunch Before the Détente is Siciliano’s digestion of the severity and absurdity of a political climate that demands calm amidst the violent encroach of fascism. On view from January 17 through February 28, 2026, the exhibition features a selection of recent paintings by Siciliano – most notably a large-scale triptych and the incorporation of neon lighting in one of the works – alongside intaglio prints recently produced in Oaxaca in collaboration with master printer Daniel Flores at Gráfica Zanate.

More than three years in the making, Sicliano’s new paintings conjure a dark-yet-humorous atmosphere that clings to the work: a convergence of diverse visual, art historical, and cinematic references that serve to take the contemporary social and political climate through an absurdist lens. Rife with vibrant colors and laden with symbolic imagery, the exhibition’s eponymous painting, Le Déjeuner Avante le Détente, for example, offers two gender-ambiguous war generals sharing a cigarette break in the company of a grandiose bouquet of bug-infested flowers– war leaders on the brink of conflict pausing for a polite cup of tea, delicate sandwiches, and polite conversation before acts of violence unfold. For its viewers, the painting performs a playful, perhaps contradictory, and somewhat familiar strategic position of beauty alongside brutality. For Siciliano, this imagined moment amplifies the inherent absurdities of political pageantry – the rituals, formalities, and cultivated aesthetics that surround systems of power and war.

Indeed throughout the work, Siciliano is particularly taken by the tension in the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the violent, not necessarily celebrating their commingling but holding it as a stance for critical observation. In many ways, Siciliano’s new works think through an uneasy overlap between desire, power, and performance. As lush flowers and carefully staged, elegant tablescapes coexist with scenes of domination and hypocrisy, they underscore what Siciliano has described as an interest in “the beauty of our struggles,” tinted with a bit of humor in order to stomach the situation. His recurring figures of war leaders embellished with both medals and BDSM chain leashes, clad in both honorary epaulettes and fishnet stockings, tap an unsettling seduction within this tension.

While Siciliano demonstrates a strong visual influence from 1960s German American painter Richard Lindner – whom Siciliano has been looking at throughout the development of these new works – the sources of inspiration for The Lunch Before the Détente are wide-reaching and various. Siciliano holds his work in the court of picaresque films of Italian fascism such as The Night Porter (1974) and Seven Beauties (1975) and the visual legacies of Francis Bacon and Peter Saul, allowing his past and present experiences of life between the United States and Mexico culminate around him. He explains how although he attempts to keep his paintings simple, “the world keeps giving me more information, and things happen.”

The Lunch Before the Détente by Timothy Siciliano presents a luscious body of new work that confronts the theatricality of political violence with wit, unease, and a healthy dose of camp, inviting viewers to consider how absurdity, beauty, and cruelty often unfold in tandem.
 

- jason n. le