Linus Borgo: Into the Blue Again

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Into the Blue Again, Linus Borgo’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will open with an artist’s reception on Thursday, March 26, from 6-8 PM, and will be on view from Thursday, March 26, through Saturday, April 25, 2026.

Linus Borgo’s (b. 1995; Stamford, CT) paintings reckon with lived time, using lavish rendering to convey experiences of embodiment through stillness and change. Into the Blue Again finds Borgo drawing his audience close, asking them to share in emotional sensation as he navigates blurred narrative boundaries between home, hospital, and studio. The artist elides action in favor of its aftermath, living in the wake of urgency as calm sets in. Across the works on view, Borgo performs a transformation: the quotidian becomes phenomenological in scenes of quiet companionship and fraught recovery.

Into the Blue Again casts an uneasy stillness. Borgo’s paintings exist in sensory stasis, as though the individual moments in time have stretched into eons: sunlight spills in languid pools, flowers are held in fleeting arrangements, and figures sit in contemplation. In his newest works, the artist shows how memories become linked to specific places and sensations, and how time is expanded by these spatial relationships. In the late nineteenth century, French philosopher Henri Bergson referred to this subjective perception of time as la durée, wherein time is indivisible, and felt rather than measured.

The exhibition’s title, Into the Blue Again, is borrowed from a lyric in the Talking Heads’ 1981 hit song “Once in a Lifetime,” where singer David Byrne grapples with a sudden disbelief at the facts of his life. He wonders, urgently: “You may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here?” Byrne is paradoxically startled by having always been where he always was, as his mind catches up with his body. The song is structured around a looping, regular groove that pushes on to infinity: “Letting the days go by / Water flowing underground / Into the blue again.” This is Borgo’s blue: a life both momentary and ad infinitum, where healing can be as uncomfortable as any change.

Change is a central theme in Borgo’s work, and he explicitly examines the ways in which corporeality shifts, such as through transition or disability. In an artwork’s imaginative capacity, these changes could be made instantaneous, yet in reality, like painting itself, they can take place over immense stretches of time. Borgo accumulates these in Cavity Sam (2025), a surreal, larger-than-life self-portrait in which he takes metaphorical stock of himself after the days have gone by. The work takes its name from the board game “Operation,” and Borgo’s frank, sometimes medical, autobiography is related through familiar aphorisms. Sensation is located as objects within the artist’s anatomy: a funny bone, a wisdom tooth, a phantom limb. Clad in cherry-print boxers, Borgo points out where in his body feelings are stored, and how the emotional and physical realms are enmeshed.

The narrative scenes on view display time explicitly. In Backslide (2024) Borgo casts an unmoving sunbeam into a recreation-room interior where patients contentedly decorate birdhouses. The artist renders saturated reflections across the scene with rich chromatic moves, and this glow is offset by poignant allegorical detail. Though lovely, the birdhouses are clearly toys, too small to house actual birds; these provide a purely ornamental comfort in the patients’ confinement. Elsewhere, in Voicemail Blues (2024), the palette is languid, rich in green and blue night tones as two patients await familiar voices by their ward’s pay phone. The broken clock behind them belies their true predicament, implying a waiting that may be without end.

Borgo finds comfort in moments like Sunny Side Up (2026), which looks across a laid table at a companion reading in quietude. The work is a still life and portrait at once, with atmospheric tones that cast a Post-Impressionist haze not unlike paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, or the later Giorgio Morandi. The quiet gaze induces a sympathetic reverie in the viewer, and in this tranquility, it ceases to matter whether the scene is a restaging for the act of painting, or a memory unto itself. The effect is a sense of genuine closeness—to have painted Sunny Side Up, Borgo had to sit with a friend.

Linus Borgo’s work has been exhibited throughout the US, including at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, TX; New Discretions, New York, NY; and Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York, NY. Works by Borgo are held in the permanent collections of the Akron Art Museum, OH; the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, NY. In 2020, Borgo was awarded the Betty Lee Stern Prize for Artists at Columbia University School of the Arts. Borgo was awarded the Anderson Ranch Fellowship at Rhode Island School of Design, where he received his BFA, as well as the Brevoort-Eickemeyer Fellowship at Columbia University, from which he holds an MFA. The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY.