Drawing from our collective consciousness of visual tropes, the self-taught artist Damian Loeb (born 1970) creates paintings that reflect a fascination with two worlds, the analogue and the digital. Combining classical painting techniques with an obsession with new media and technology, Loeb’s work at once references the traditional themes of art history, the language of cinematography, and images from our visually saturated contemporary culture.

Loeb’s early paintings were based on collaged images appropriated from advertising, magazines, and films, which he recontextualized, edited, and compressed to heighten their unsettling narrative qualities. After photographers brought a series of lawsuits against the artist over copyright infringement, Loeb taught himself photography and began using his own photographs as source imagery for his paintings, embarking on series of cinematic portraits and landscapes.

Sooner Than You Think belongs to a series Loeb painted of his wife Zoya, depicting her in intimate moments of quiet calm, seen nude or in states of undress, and yet seemingly comfortable in the (imagined) presence of her husband. Based on photographs the artist took of his wife over the course of a decade, the images reveal the intimate moments of a life's narrative, exposing both the anticlimactic and the revelatory nature of privacy. Investigating the inseparable connection between subject and object, model and artist, these paintings suggest that voyeurism is not one-sided or passive but an active relationship connecting the image and viewer. Typical of Loeb’s rich layering of references, the paintings are at once reminiscent of Old Master portraits in their use of chiaroscuro and compositions, the vocabulary of cinematography with their silent melodrama and narrative tension, while their square format evokes the snapshot of the instant Polaroid.