In this sense, his painting is located in wake of Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning rather than on that of John Singer Sargent and Edward Hopper. An old painting, but always lustful, or rather a kind of cultured and refined "vulgarization" of classical figurative art, allows Currin to enhance the painting itself, and with it to define a new form of artistic beauty that benefits an unprecedented imagination or figurative "way". Those bodies and faces, sometimes made even disreputable, appear beautiful by the pictorial transfiguration, through sophisticated vulgarization of the classic code. In some paintings women and men have sex like playing a porn scene, his characters live the body and sexuality in an exhibitionistic and altered way. They seem to recite the subject in a scene created for a movie or a selfie. In this sense Currin researches and actives something paradoxical: between reality and fiction, contemplation and voyeurism, obscene and refined, photographic truth and figurative invention. Weakened or numb figures, not because of drugs or extreme practices, but rather to moral weakness are the artistic pretext to paint with deliberate honesty and frankness forgetting every academic nostalgia and all ideological aversion to figurative painting.
Never unpleasant, disgusting, and granted, Currin faces genres and styles choosing and alternating different themes and registers as the portrait, the still life, the obscene and vulgar, the lyrical and the sentimental. His ability appears in portraits created with fast and derogatory brushstrokes as Frans Hals and Édouard Manet in still lifes made with the expert handwriting of a Dutch Renaissance painter in tapestry and bouquets of roses with an impressionistic freshness. Every picture is also a simultaneous homage to the great European painting and its different seasons: the Renaissance paintings (Botticelli and Cranach), the Mannerist one (Dosso Dossi and Parmigianino), as well as Tiepolo and Fragonard, Courbet and Monet, Magritte and Otto Dix, the pornographic illustration of Giulio Romano, and that of Paul-Émile Bécat. The nudity is ostentatious, as well as the genitals, which appear performed with meticulous unchastity, in the same way of a head of hair, a fabric, a decorative element or furniture, a porcelain service, a jug filled with water, a turkey or a lobster. Often the women portrayed in pairs or gallant conversations, smile and grind, suffer and enjoy at the same time and manner.
Anger, hysteria, symptomatic defects inscribed terms as 'comedy' in noble compositions. In many cases behind the sparkling beauty, the lush sensuality, it brings out a sense of emptiness and glacial indifference, as if the well-being and luxury had made insensitive skin and soul turning romantic love in in apathetic sexual consumption. His women are super strength (round and swollen breasts and hips), or otherwise display their thinness, a sterility that is both the soul and body.