With the purchase of a Polaroid camera in 1984, O’Reilly was able to vary his poses and combinative play with art history, so we might, for instance, find him nude in Velasquez’s studio. His compositions became less reliant upon centrally placed single figures. The following year, he began rephotographing the images taken from books and magazines so that he could control the size and scale of the appropriated imagery. This resulted in a more complex and evocative planar architecture and more dynamic interactions and disjunctions between the protagonists of his narrative. He also began to use a miniature stage, with tiny props, restaging, rephotographing, cutting, recutting, arranging, rearranging until he had the proper pieces to paste into place in one of his enigmatic puzzles. He could shuffle and reshuffle art history from antiquity to Thomas Eakins or Robert Mapplethorpe, now jubilating, now elegizing, now anxiously agitating.

John O'Reilly, French Glass, 1989,
Polaroid montage

In 1991, a further intensification of means and subject took place. Now, instead of composing arrangements in a single, seamless horizontal band, he began to construct a double band of montaged fragments, letting edges and tears reveal his procedures of making. Formal and subjective upheavals roiled his planes as he focused more intently on the mortality of the flesh, ranging from the physical, moral, and religious turmoil of war, to private elegies for the death of a young friend, to reflections of the shadowy vapors and fleeting memories of purely interior musings.