There’s a good deal going on in “Too Sure of the Sun,” an exhibition of new paintings by Adam Lupton at Galerie Judin, though you might not detect it at first glance. Glum-looking figures stretch out on carpets or rest their heads on elbows, lost in somber, nagging contemplation; the paintings carry a constant tension between their laid-back settings and a sense of weighty introspection. In The Space Between Myself and Myself (2026), a half-naked figure sits in the dark, window shutters drawn, the world shut out but not shut off. Sitting on a bed and outlined in the half-light, he appears almost heroic. At his feet lie discarded scraps of paper with seemingly random numbers and the intriguing phrase: “Not ‘the one.’”
Lupton often uses scattered notes and phrases to reveal a fractured, spiraling interiority. In Order of Operations (2025), a bare, skinny torso — probably the artist’s own — is covered with inked reminders of everyday chores: “GET EYES TESTED,” “CALL MOM,” “SCHEDULE PAINTING PICK UP.” What started as notes on a hand has expanded to engulf the whole body; pink flesh becomes a raw interface for a bureaucratic to-do list. Later, in A Sign of the Times (2025), a bare white toe poking through a dark red sock is magnified into something oddly consequential; the implicit humor takes a moment to land, caught in the perfectly weighted balance between the painting’s blank seriousness and the title’s overstatement.
Since moving from Canada to Germany in 2022, Lupton has restricted himself to just two colors: blue and red. The artist has spoken about having OCD, and the paintings seem to reflect this in their recurring images of cleanliness –– sinks, baths, soaps –– and the relentlessly replicated patterns that he often stencils onto their surfaces. You see it in the endless twisting links of the woolen jersey in The Length of Tomorrow (2026), and in Conditional Equation (2026), where the petals of a plucked flower coalesce into an impossibly ordered structure above the figure beneath.
The reduced color and repetition can make the paintings feel claustrophobic, but not unpleasant. His neuroses are strangely companionable. You find yourself considering these figures as they read, stare, and sit around, always with the same faintly bored expression. And yet the works are full of desire — not sexual exactly, but an aching, unfulfilled longing. In Unmoor (2025), a bathing figure, his genitals tastefully concealed, is surrounded by tiles depicting muscular men wrestling. He seems unmoved by it, listless, the spectacle of male agency reflecting back on his own sopping inertia.
There is something generational in the mood of the paintings, in their bathetic contrast between high intensity and the profoundly trivial. You can almost hear Rue from Euphoria (2019–26) delivering a deadpan inner monologue as you walk around, making every minor discomfort sound at once sardonic and existential. Maybe, as the press text implies, Lupton is reflecting the unsettled state of the world. But the paintings feel less like a mirror of collective crisis than an exercise in private, intimate indulgence.
In The Past is No Place to Rest Your Eyes (2026), one of the biggest paintings in the exhibition, a looming scene of brick buildings fills the window, order returning in their rectangular rigidity. In the foreground, paying no attention to the urban view, a figure, head in hand, has scribbled in a notebook: “Your show is going to suck.” As elsewhere, interiority is hidden, then teasingly offered. But is it self-doubt or studied self-deprecation? It’s not altogether clear, though here, for once, it feels too self-conscious to be entirely sincere.
