What Portrait Painting Means Today? - Hold Still at Auxier Kline

Install View of Hold Still - Auxier Kline Gallery

BY SERENA HANZHI WANG Feb 20th, 2025

To paint a portrait today feels almost unfashionable.

We live inside faces. They scroll past us hourly. They are filtered, sharpened, corrected, cropped. Portraiture, as an image category, has never been more abundant. That is exactly why an artist who paints portraits slowly, from life, on paper or canvas, can feel difficult to place.

Contemporary portrait painting seems to have split in two directions. On one side, it sits comfortably in the market: slick, technically assured figurative work, often autobiographical, often framed through identity, often scaled to announce ambition. Interesting artists painting their own interesting faces. It is confident. It is fluent.

And then there is the older impulse: the one that begins when you first sketch your parents at six years old. The more ordinary reason for becoming an artist. Watching someone long enough to understand how their posture settles. Noticing how they change. Or how they do not. This side of painting is about getting closer to another person rather than asserting yourself.

Hold Still, on view at Auxier Kline in Lower East Side, NYC, gathers works that belong to the latter. Aidan Lapp brings together drawings and oil paintings made from repeated sittings with friends. The exhibition text references John Berger’s writing on drawing, particularly his belief that drawing brings the artist closer to the person being observed, until the boundary between subject and maker begins to shift.

Michael, a oil painting soft on the edges. His posture is firm. The background collapses into a dark field. The mood feels settled, almost buoyant. Not dramatically so, but enough to register. 

Isaac in Sweater carries more edge than the earlier portraits. His eyes hold what people jokingly call resting bitch eyes. He sits on a small couch, wrapped in a floral knit that feels slightly too cheerful for his mood. The sweater is painted with care, each pattern held long enough to feel deliberate but not decorative. It briefly brings to mind someone like David Hockney in the straightforward pleasure of painting fabric.

Izzy feels more direct. The face is built through structure. The nose, in particular, is rendered with accuracy, not idealized. Lapp does not smooth out its angles. He lets it hold its shape. You can see that he is trying to get the face right, not stylize it, not turn it into something else. The features stay grounded in the person in front of him.

Another work that stands out is Wally. Unlike the earlier portraits, the surrounding space feels more defined here. A plant in front of him pushes into the foreground instead of fading back. His shirt carries a distinct pattern, handled with care. The fabric holds its own against the body. Even the small details of the setting feel considered. Wally sits with his hands folded, grounded within that space.

Lapp has spoken about how art school trained him to question what art could be, to push against categories, to think in terms of boundaries and scale. The pressure toward the grand gesture is familiar to anyone who has spent four years in a studio program. For him, painting only began to feel natural when he stopped trying to invent something large. It became easier when he turned toward what was already around him. Friends. Lovers. Bedrooms. The fall of someone’s hair. The way a sweater sits on the shoulders.

Much of Hold Still revolves around being in one’s twenties. The paintings do not dramatize youth, but they register it quietly. The clothing feels tied to a particular moment. The interiors feel temporary, like spaces not yet settled into permanence. Even the repetition carries a sense of duration.

Lapp has described an earlier portrait of an ex-boyfriend as a turning point, the moment when painting someone he cared about felt urgent rather than academic. That intimacy remains visible here. The sitters are not treated as problems to solve. They are treated as people still unfolding.

I have recently written about many artists who paint through online culture and pop references, building a kind of visual density layered with quotation, signals. It can be sharp. It can be fun. It can also become exhausting sometimes. That is why I wanted to write about Lapp’s work, why it feels different to me. His portraits are not engineered to grab the eye. They return to something more fundamental: the daily discipline of looking. The daily act of looking here feels rooted in love and affection rather than fascination and obsession. In that steadiness, portraiture regains its quiet force.