We just want to take a moment to celebrate Jonathan Lyndon Chase. Jonathan has a much deserved spotlight on them, which you can read about below. So, we think it’s the perfect time to encourage you to revisit Jonathan Lyndon Chase talks painting and queer lives matter, our 2017 Artblog Radio with them! (30 minutes of good talk)
And while we’re at it, we have to say you’re missing out if you haven’t read new Artblog contributor Corey Qureshi’s recently penned thoughtful and poetic review of Jonathan’s new book Wild Wild Wild West / Haunting of the Seahorse . We highly recommend this short but powerful read.
They were also just glowingly reviewed by Roberta Smith for their current exhibition at Company Gallery:
Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s New York solo debut at Company in 2018 introduced a remarkable young painter. The artist’s sophomore effort, “Wind Rider,” at Baby Company — Company’s new project space — provides ample corroboration. It continues a startlingly frank, exuberant exploration of the intersection of race, homoeroticism and personal identity. The new paintings introduce the additional subversive theme of the gay Black cowboy, and with it, lawlessness and the myth of straight white masculinity. The riches of this territory are once more conveyed by entanglements of bodies and faces, now joined by horses, cowboy hats and hints of frontier buildings. All motifs benefit from ingenious combinations of strident drawing and suave stained color; they are often simultaneously transparent and opaque, explicit and mysterious. Graffiti, spray paint and glitter are used.
There is plenty of action. In the work “grandma’s garden (heart emoji),” a pair of possibly naked young men — one of them apparently backward on his horse — high-tail it out of somewhere. In “gathering on 5th Street,” the yellow light streaming from the Chinese restaurant illuminates a black-hooded executioner type. And “lucky lovers” depicts two men in shades of hot pink engaged in either rough sex or murder. Drawings abound; sculpture — more plentiful than previously — includes a pair of swinging saloon doors, horseshoes made of foam, painted shovels and a horizontal slab that is identified on the checklist as “a Baptist church door,” painted deep lavender. Chase makes skillful use of numerous precedents, among them, it seems, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Max Beckmann. This is an amazing show.
ROBERTA SMITH
Published Nov. 11, 2020 / Print Nov. 13, 2020
Congrats Jonathan, from the Artblog family!
