Chelsea Highlights: Berry Campbell, Yossi Milo, Sean Kelly, Rosebud Contemporary, Tenri Cultural Institute, A Hug from the Art World

Liam Otero, Whitehot Magazine, January 4, 2026
Zoe Walsh: Night Fields at Yossi Milo Gallery
 
I am dead certain the average reader on here will agree with me that one cannot truly appreciate a physical work of art if it is solely seen through either a digital or print reproduction. Brushstrokes are lost, collaged textures have flattened, everything is blended into one mass. Presuming you are a devoted gallery goer like me, this is my plea to you to visit Zoe Walsh’s show at Yossi Milo, for any digital reproduction of their work does not do justice in visually conveying the technical mastery behind Walsh's multifaceted paintings.
 
Yossi Milo’s press release gives an extremely thorough breakdown of Walsh’s creative process, but in sum, it is quite a dedicatedly laborious one entailing 3D modeling, elaborately staged photographic tableaux, research-based sourcing of archival materials, multiple layers of silkscreening, and painting. 
 
Queer visibility is an important theme that permeates Walsh’s images as they incorporate film stills from the works of the gay, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Pat Rocco (American, 1934 - 2018) in tandem with photographs taken by Walsh in collaboration with their spouse Isabel Osgood-Roach and friends.
 
The fruits of Walsh’s creative labors amounts to a spectrally bounteous collection of images brimming with an impassioned vitality. Nude silhouettes of youthful figures gather and relax in the rays of idealized nature, represented in overlapping transparent layers in tonally varied shades of non-localized colors. It’s important to keep changing your vantage points when observing Walsh’s paintings because this interaction will not only make you more attuned to the fastidiousness of their detailing, but also to experience an illusory movement of the subjects such as the swaying of trees or the rustle of bushes.
 
 

When you study the history of Western painting, scenes of amorous display often centralize a heterosexual gaze enmeshed within the aesthetic strictures of the academic landscape genre. Walsh went ahead and transformed this into a show of not only queer visibility, but queer reclamation. The figures are situated in a plane of reverie denoted by the tranquilly sensuous atmosphere overflowing in prismatic illuminations. Their bodily gestures, too, reveal a sense of liberation - a lone figure with a leg bent like an explorer as they gaze off into the distance, a man and a woman whose bodies affectionately coalesce within the branches of a tree, and multiple scenes of reposed daydreaming. 

 

An impressive aspect to Walsh’s paintings is that this emotive power is consistent irrespective of the scale of works as their compositions in the exhibition range from conventional painterly dimensions (around 30 x 24 inches) to a nearly wall-to-wall work comprising three canvas-wrapped panels.

 

Pleasure as a form of agency for an individual and an entire community was one of the lasting takeaways I reaped from both viewing Walsh’s works and reading the stories behind their inception from the show’s beautifully composed press release. The settings for these images are deeply Los Angeles-rooted - the parkland scenes deriving from Griffith and Elysian, which is where many of Rocco’s works were filmed. Walsh’s sites of nature as metaphors for liberation and open expression made me think of the ways in which this idea can be seen as an evolution from some notable predecessors, namely 18th Century Rococo fête galante paintings and Henri Matisse’s recurrent cavorting nude figures. Much like these earlier art historical examples, Walsh’s resplendent works accomplish similar sensations, but their work is totally in a league of its own on account of the nuance brought to its technical and narrative weaves.