O’Reilly is the casting director and producer of small yet powerful
dramas in which the characters are drawn from history, art and religion.
He packs a powerful amount of technical, iconographic, and psychological
material in his exquisite, tiny polaroid collages, and weaves together
improbable but highly personal and potent compostions, often including
himself. And like a long-running reperatory theater, the proscenium,scale
and types of characters remain the same, but the stories and staging change.
Like Zelig, O’Reilly inserts himself into scenes from history which
merge art, war, death and religion with the homoerotic.
For twenty seven years he and his long time partner Jim Tellin shared a position as an art therapist at Worcester State Hospital, which helped enable him to combine his careful intellectual and technical processes with a freedom of ideas and expression. He draws from a personal lexicon of favored artists - among them Caravaggio, Velasquez, Titian, Eakins, Corot, Boucher, Picasso and Vermeer. During the 1980s he literally placed himself- in the form of self-portraits- in their studios and subjects, and demonstrates why he has chosen them to identify with. Unlikely but seemingly inevitable occasions arise from his combinations. We see O’Reilly cavorting with Picasso in his studio, nuzzling with a with a Rembrandt self-portrait or combined with a Vermeer maiden. Referances to literature and liturgy also abound and O’Reilly’s quiet existence in Worcester, Massachusetts is proven to be a psychological arena where he creates his own pantheon.
During the 1990s he disappeared from his compostions but the themes continued. In "Occupied Territory", a series created during the mid 1990s, O’Reilly created a hilarious yet terrifying hybrid by joining the heads of German soldiers gleaned from a found photography album with the bodies of nude men derived from mid-century male physique nude journals, and placed them in idyllic landscapes by Corot. War and peace, male and female, the real and ideal were fused into a timeless Platonic dilogue.
"O’Reilly’s art may appear to be a theater of the absurd, but it is more a theater of the self...His skillful artistic surgery historical mythology and urges us to question our own realities."
For twenty seven years he and his long time partner Jim Tellin shared a position as an art therapist at Worcester State Hospital, which helped enable him to combine his careful intellectual and technical processes with a freedom of ideas and expression. He draws from a personal lexicon of favored artists - among them Caravaggio, Velasquez, Titian, Eakins, Corot, Boucher, Picasso and Vermeer. During the 1980s he literally placed himself- in the form of self-portraits- in their studios and subjects, and demonstrates why he has chosen them to identify with. Unlikely but seemingly inevitable occasions arise from his combinations. We see O’Reilly cavorting with Picasso in his studio, nuzzling with a with a Rembrandt self-portrait or combined with a Vermeer maiden. Referances to literature and liturgy also abound and O’Reilly’s quiet existence in Worcester, Massachusetts is proven to be a psychological arena where he creates his own pantheon.
During the 1990s he disappeared from his compostions but the themes continued. In "Occupied Territory", a series created during the mid 1990s, O’Reilly created a hilarious yet terrifying hybrid by joining the heads of German soldiers gleaned from a found photography album with the bodies of nude men derived from mid-century male physique nude journals, and placed them in idyllic landscapes by Corot. War and peace, male and female, the real and ideal were fused into a timeless Platonic dilogue.
"O’Reilly’s art may appear to be a theater of the absurd, but it is more a theater of the self...His skillful artistic surgery historical mythology and urges us to question our own realities."
Francine Koslow Miller "John O’Reilly’s Miniature Polaroid
Collage" The Print Collector’s Newsletter
Worcester Odyssey 2003 [view images]
Survey 1985-2002 [view images]