American Collection Painting 60 (Warhol, Twombly), 2023, oil on canvas. 32 x 56 in.

The rooms of painter Brian Rideout’s west-end Toronto studio are lined with paintings that seem to open into other rooms. Each canvas invites the viewer to wander into a spare, expansive living space from a bygone era. Since 2014, Rideout’s subjects have been pristinely designed interiors originally photographed for magazines or coffee-table books, which he reproduces in oil in his ongoing series American Collection Paintings.

Rideout grew up in Peterborough, Ontario, and studied visual arts at Georgian College, where the emphasis was resolutely hands-on. “I basically painted every day for three years,” he says. After moving to Toronto, he worked as an art handler at Mira Godard Gallery before joining the studio of Kent Monkman, where he spent six years painting landscapes. The experience sharpened his technical confidence and reinforced his view of painting as skilled labour rather than a rarefied intellectual pursuit, while also exposing him to a model of history painting that openly grappled with power, myth, and cultural hierarchy. These concerns would later resurface as he established his own practice.

For his American Collection Paintings, Rideout often sources images from the internet, hunts down the vintage printed matter in which they first appeared, and then paints the rooms depicted at a large scale. The motif uniting many of the scenes is the conspicuous placement of important modernist artworks by giants such as Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse, and Francis Bacon.

In Rideout’s studio, among familiar items such as stretcher bars, reference books, paint tubes, and palettes, there’s a dusty projector on a small table. He guards it as if he’s a museum attendant in charge of a Ming dynasty vase. In the projector’s line of sight is a work in progress mounted on the wall: an enormous canvas that Rideout has started underpainting. On it are the bones of a living room with plush chintz sofas, a potted amaryllis, and framed Matisse lithographs on the walls. The scene is borrowed from the cover story of the November 1996 issue of Architectural Digest, and in recreating it, Rideout has retained aspects of the page itself as architectural elements, marking a new development in his practice.

Here, the graphic design framework that usually fades into the background—layout, numbering, and margins—is deliberately kept in frame. In Rideout’s as-yet-untitled exhibition, opening on April 2nd at Towards Gallery in Toronto, all the paintings “are going to deal with the structural elements of the printing and the page and the source material,” he says.

In several works, Rideout leans into details that feel almost too blunt to be conceptual, until you realize what function they serve. In the aforementioned work in progress, for example, a lampshade is positioned in the gutter, the crease between opposite pages where a magazine is bound. The object’s alignment is ever so slightly cut off, a glitch that Rideout has faithfully reproduced. “I’m dealing with this split from the graphic design and the gutter and how the gutter kind of forces the image to change,” he says. By foregrounding the physicality of the medium, he reminds us that these scenes are staged—constructed fantasies rather than neutral documents.

If you were to accidentally bump into the projector in his studio, those minute calculations he’s made in calibrating the correct aspect ratio would be disastrously thrown off. While Rideout interprets colour temperatures in his versions of the originals, he is careful not to alter the source images too drastically. “I don’t interject myself whatsoever,” he says. He never diverts from the composition or content of the source, but there is one variable he always inserts: time. That aspect, he slows down considerably.

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“I spend all this time looking, looking, looking, looking,” he says. “All that looking is really about an appreciation for what’s already there.” —Brian Rideout

 

In a sense, he transports himself inside these rooms and lives inside them, as their occupants did. With his obsessive, procedural looking—he’ll work on a painting for “a month straight, every single day”—he discovers details he previously overlooked only when he paints them. The process repeats itself when his works enter his clients’ homes. “When people live with the paintings,” he says, “I often get stories later, later, later, where they’re like, there’s this thing, there’s this object in the painting—the whole time I’ve owned it, I’ve never come across this thing.”

I try looking at Rideout’s canvases and imagining what thing I might belatedly notice if I were to live with them. Truth be told, when I first encountered his works, it didn’t immediately click for me that many contained one or more modernist masterpieces hiding in plain sight. Perhaps I’m so accustomed to seeing Twomblys and Picassos in museums, aloft in empty white cubes, that it didn’t register when they appeared in domestic settings. Or maybe they just blended in with all the other status-signifying decor in the rooms: the Eames lounger, the Panton chairs, the architecture itself.

American Collection Painting 50 (Louis, Artschwager), 2021, oil on canvas. 60 x 74 in.

American Collection Painting 62 (Bacon), 2023, oil on canvas. 36 × 32 inches.

Viewers will arrive in Rideout’s rooms through different doors—art, furniture, architecture, interior design—and only later notice the real subject: the way culture is staged to reflect wealth. The paintings implicitly reference a historical moment when collecting came to function as an index of social position, what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theorized as “cultural capital” in his 1979 book La Distinction. The postwar modernist canon, defined by mid-20th-century artists whose work now anchors museum collections and art-historical textbooks, still dominates collector taste because it offers one of the most reliable ways to alchemize money into legitimacy. Anything else is a little riskier.

Rideout’s paintings can thus be read as case studies in the transformation of private wealth into cultural authority from the mid-20th century onward. Rejecting bourgeois ideals, collectors at this time abandoned opulence in favour of restraint. The aesthetic of austerity became a way of conveying intellectual superiority.

The American Collection Paintings series brings us inside the machinery of the art world and reveals how natural it can feel to those who inhabit it, while making clear that only a narrow class of elites would ever feel fully “at home” in rooms such as these. The absence of people in the scenes reinforces this effect. In spaces such as these, power is inherent. Rideout paints what authority looks like once it no longer needs to announce, explain, or justify itself.

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“They’ve been described as a history of a class,” Brian Rideout says of his paintings. He admits he struggles with the idea of hierarchies, both in social systems and the organization of images. “I participate in the hierarchy by turning them into oil paintings and acknowledging that as the height of this value system,” he says of his work, “but I don’t fully believe in that.”

 

He says that he paints not because he believes it’s the highest art form, but because he’s a painter. “If I was a different kind of artist, I would just blow these up, or just do nothing. I would just cut them out and put them on the wall,” he says. “But I don’t have the framework to make that my work.”

The first painting that Rideout made for American Collection Paintings, before he was even fully conscious of the idea for the series, was Drawing Room Interior, 2014, which depicts an office space from The Office Book by Judy Graf Klein (second edition, 1982). He pulls the book from a stack and opens it to the page on which the image appears. “It’s not even mentioned in any of this writing or anything that they just happen to have this amazing art collection,” he says, pointing out a Matisse hanging unobtrusively in the background.

This image prompted him to think about Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911), as well as 17th-century Flemish paintings of collectors’ cabinets, such as Willem van Haecht’s The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (1628). He began cataloguing more recent equivalents.

At the time, Rideout hadn’t worked extensively in oil. “I wanted to deal with a much longer history of painting,” he says of his decision to experiment in the medium. “I wanted all the tropes and context of oil painting to be a part of the work.”

Five years into making the series, he painted American Collection 38 (Louis), 2019, sourced from an image he had encountered online. When he went searching for the original, he discovered it in a book he already owned: the same edition of The Office Book. It appeared on the facing page of the very image he had painted first. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says.

This coincidence pushed him back toward printed matter. Online research, he notes, is shaped by algorithms that feed you more of what you already seek. “I’ve kind of lost focus on, like, am I discovering these things? Are they discovering me?”

His project is to determine the value of the images he depicts. They are meaningful in that they catalogue part of the history of contemporary-art collecting but often only incidentally. A lot of the time, Rideout says, “the artwork in them is not referenced or even acknowledged.”

American Collection Painting 57 (Lovell Health House), 2023, oil on canvas. 40 × 34 inches.

 

 

American Collection Painting 65 (Putnam Collection), 2023, oil on canvas. 38 ½ × 26 ½ inches.

What they provide is a narrative around how the cultural elite actually lived with art that is now only accessible in textbooks, museums, and the secondary market. “Some of these are from auction catalogues,” Rideout says of the images he has collected. “So I know for certain that this work has been split up and will never exist in this way ever again.”

Like voyeurs peering through illuminated windows at night, we get to glimpse a masterpiece in situ, “with all the effects of the light and shadow from the room, and how it works with the other objects,” Rideout says. It’s a demystifying intimacy, akin to seeing a celebrity without makeup.

In his own paintings, he says, “Every new space gives me a different opportunity to figure something else out.” By learning how to recreate a Helen Frankenthaler in one of his representational paintings, for example, he’s folding art history in on itself, incorporating abstract expressionism and realism on one level plane. “Every time I recreate some work,” he says, “I try and figure out the whole process of the artist who made that work.” He likens it to the standard academic practice of museum copying that apprentice artists in Europe followed between the 1600s and 1800s.

Rideout outlines the two sides of his project. “One of them is, like, developing these conceptual ideas about these structures and how these images support the structures of the art world,” he says. “The other one is just trying to become the greatest painter that ever lived.”

Rideout was able to strike out on his own as a painter by collaborating with clients on commissioned works—a model with echoes of the early-modern patronage system. In 2025, he completed a series of 12 paintings for the Copenhagen-based furniture company Gubi for a Danish design fair. Projects such as these provide a financial runway that allows him to subsidize self-directed investigations.

American Collection Painting 64 (Lichtenstein, Warhol), 2023. 36 × 28 inches.

American Collection Painting 59 (Ryman, Twombly), 2023, oil on canvas. 38 x 36 in.

 

Something he’s interested in exploring more is depicting figures. He’s done portraits before, but not much yet as part of this series. “That’s why I really wanted to do the Rodin,” he says, referencing The Shade Stands in the Living Room (The Cantor Collection), 2025, “because that was a way of bringing the figure into the work without having it be just a person.”

Rideout’s American Collection Paintings project is far from complete. There are many more rooms that he wants to enter, and many more details he’s excited to discover. “I hope that part of what painting them does is bring in that second viewing and give the work another chance to connect with people,” he says.

By incorporating the details of the printed page in his newest works, Rideout adds yet another layer of mediation to scenes already several steps removed from real life. The rooms were first staged for magazines, then reproduced in print, then converted into JPEGs, and then translated again through the slow labour of oil painting. “All of this is constructed,” Rideout says. “It’s all fake.”

Making the artifice explicit peels back another layer of architecture from the power structures that keep works of art at an illegible distance from everyone except the elite. But Rideout is still convinced of the value of the images he collects. “I’m a good looker,” he says. “I’m good at noticing what’s deep in the background.”

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