McCaffrey’s paintings of imagined European interiors decorated with imagined European art are the perfect postcards of an American mind for whom everything is ‘content’. The artist peppers his void copies of Regency interior designs with signifiers, also void, of what the originals may have once played host to. Early Renaissance is his favourite: van Eyck’s round mirrors abound, for example, yet the Arnolfini are missing.
The result fails to distinguish between the frame and what’s inside it. Frameless themselves, the paintings only encapsulate how McCaffrey’s native US — forever a colony — still understands “Europe” and its cultural hinterland. Can Europe still tell the difference?
