NOON Projects is honored to present "Corner Time," a solo exhibition of new paintings by Matt Lifson. Through careful engagement with the canon of narrative painting—particularly the social realists of the early 20th century—"Corner Time" presents a series of intimate portraits that reflect the social temperature and malaise of the present moment. Lifson’s third exhibition with the gallery centers on his queer community in Los Angeles. His portraits capture friends he’s met over the past fifteen years, tracing the intimacy and trust that form his circle and revealing the shared tenderness at the heart of queer connection. "Corner Time" also marks a significant development in Lifson’s painting practice and approach to exhibition-making. Whereas earlier bodies of work began with a preconceived concept and drew from screen-based media—horror films, vintage pornography, and digitally manipulated imagery—this series emerged quietly and organically. Lifson chose to create one painting at a time, working on an easel on smaller canvases in closer dialogue with the body. The source material for these works originated in one-on-one sessions between the artist and his subjects. Looking to artists such as Vermeer, Cadmus, Wyeth, and Neel-with particular emphasis on Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and the Social Realist painters who illuminated working-class life, Lifson draws on this lineage to frame the present. His portraits depict queer people at home, surrounded by the familiar objects of contemporary life: flat-pack furniture, safety-pin earrings, houseplants, trinkets, and souvenirs. Within these domestic spaces, he positions his subjects in the corner - a charged site historically associated with discipline, marginalization, and entrapment. The resulting paintings capture unedited, candid moments within domestic spaces: a figure hunched over a lava lamp in a dimly lit room; a hazy Sunday morning in bed; a lover caught getting dressed through an open bathroom door. Lifson’s gaze peers behind the curtain of his subjects’ lives in a way that feels more ethnographic than voyeuristic. In doing so, he performs what artists have always been called to do: to look both within and without, observing, focusing, and faithfully depicting what he sees. Unlike Vermeer’s portraits of the middle class, Lifson’s paintings focus on a queer class, rendered in the tones and textures of the current moment. Lifson resists inflated optimism, instead offering an unembellished record of contemporary life. "Corner Time" punctuates the here and now without offering answers— instead offering an observation, dimly lit, in the corner, grounded in honesty. For more information email info@noon-projects.com