Welcome to GQ's New Masculinity issue, an exploration of the ways that traditional notions of masculinity are being challenged, overturned, and evolved. Read more about the issue from GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch here and hear Pharrell's take on the matter here.
When I arrive at the North Philadelphia studio of the painter Jonathan Lyndon Chase, there are four finished large-scale canvases sitting outside, waiting to be picked up. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he received his MFA in 2016, has acquired one, and the other three, on the heels of two recent sold-out exhibitions, are off to his New York dealer, Company Gallery. The gallery will show and sell them at upcoming art fairs to private collectors and museums eager to add Chase to their collections.
All of the paintings are of black queer men that Chase has constructed by fusing together his own biography with fantasy. Any one figure is an admixture of males he has seen and lusted after in real life, in porn films, in books, on social media, and in his imagination. Sssh (2019), a mundane scene leaning against the wall, features three black figures sitting on a couch, in various states of undress. They are at ease or trying to be. On a muddy brown surface, the figures' bodies are intertwined, easing the line between abstraction and figuration: A stray hand touches a knee tenderly, a head lies sound asleep across an unexpecting lap. It's all a metaphorical ménage à trois: The men mirror one another's desires. The way we can see through their bodies, which seem to merge and appear endless, speaks to a sly sense of dysphoria. Their desires and who we ask them to be do not match. The gesture also speaks to the honest transparency with which Chase paints the interior worlds of black gay men that have mostly been kept off the canvas and behind closed doors. Love, between these men, has come at a cost. They pick it up where they can, parading it, carefully but freely, as if it is a balancing act between shame and survival.
The painting that catches my eye is Good Dress (2019). It is a portrait of a brown-skinned femme sitting on the floor of an emerald green living room. His gaze carries a soft, sensuous confidence that sets the image's tone. He sports cornrows with pink highlights, and his ears are adorned with two sizable rhinestones that mimic cushion-shaped diamond earrings. They complement his long beautiful eyelashes, thick lips, and broad nose. His slim-thick figure and heart, drawn lightly in marker, can be seen clearly through an outline of a slip dress hugging him. He is pretty and poetic, perfectly embodying a bit of verse, called “Waiting for you,” that Chase wrote for his 2018 Quiet Storm exhibition catalog:
Whodat
Whodat
Whoda whoda
Whodat
Dat nigga is fine, fresh, poppin, and the best
Dat nigga is dangerously sweet and got me falling off my feet
It's early July, and when the door opens to Chase's workspace, the 30-year-old is standing a few feet away, wearing a black shirt embossed with a tiny pride flag that complements black Adidas track shorts and Nike slides. His five-foot-six heavyset frame is covered in specks of acrylic and silver spray paint. Before I arrived, he was at work on a section of Logan, an in-progress painting named after a subway station in his hometown. The backdrop is sunshine yellow, and at this stage in the process, he has drawn the face of a handsome male in black oil stick. Like Chase, the figure has a low-cut fade. The name of the station is tagged in green spray paint above the figure's head. It is one of what will become 22 scenes in a new series that will represent Chase's impressions of each stop on the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority's Broad Street line. “These are a large part just from my memory, going and traveling, train commuting, having lovers, friends, being loud and gay on the train—taking up too much space,” he explains, pointing to those he has already finished.
Chase is one of the most in-demand emerging young painters in the country. Nearly all the conversations I have had with art-world types about the future of black figuration, given its recent renaissance led by artists like Amy Sherald and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, has included glowing mention of Chase. It's also a fact that his roomy studio confirms. It is filled with dozens of canvases, sculptures, drawings, and scrapbooks that have been exhibited already or will be. Shoes, hats, tubes of paint, and his grandmother's old queen-size bed are scattered throughout. The space could be mistaken for the lab of a mad scientist: There is a lot of experimentation under way and the occasional breakthrough on the floor. There are also things that didn't work out—a few bad paintings that are overly insular, that nonetheless chart the path of a maturing hand. At a desk in the center of the room, his husband of three years and studio manager, Will, is writing emails. “He keeps it all in check, keeps my head on straight,” says the painter of his partner, whom he met through the online dating site OkCupid nearly a decade ago. Will made the first move but says he doesn't recall the pick-up line. Chase reminds him with glee: “You were all like, ‘Hi, I just want to say you're really handsome, no disrespect.…’ ” “He was my first,” his partner admits, slightly embarrassed. Will adds, “I always believed in him. I feel like when you love someone, you always support their goals and dreams no matter what.” The couple recently purchased a house outside the city, in the township of Cheltenham, and live a supportive and relatively quiet life together. “I generally believe in, like, soul mates, but I feel like you have to foster that and you have to look for it,” adds Chase.
The search to sustain love can be seen throughout Chase's emerging oeuvre as a search for self. “I'm interested in just being honest,” Chase says, standing near an untitled text painting that reads: “love my thighs.” Finding his voice, style, and focus has taken time, he tells me. Chase has made art since he was a young boy growing up in North Philly. “Everyone always asks, ‘How long have you done art? What's your influence?’ That would be my mom, Mary Chase. She used to draw for me a lot, so that's where I get my visual love from.” He says intently, in his soft voice, that she used to create mermaids and cartoon characters when he was five years old, and it fascinated him. Her influence is felt in his art to this day, as he uses humble materials—graphite, glitter, watercolor, costume jewelry—that can be found in everyday life. His mark making, which deliberately recalls the work of a child with loose fine motor skills and that of an amateur cartoonist, even reflects Mary Chase's hand and his effort to be legible to everyday viewers. Throughout our two days together, he routinely mentions the importance of making “accessible” drawings, paintings, collages, and sculptures, even when they depict black males engaged in explicit erotic acts.
“I think there is a canon and history with oil paint by itself that's very pretentious,” he says. It's Chase's way of summing up the centuries-old history of Western painting that has privileged and idealized white bodies, desires, and narratives that have only occasionally and often creepily hinted at same-sex attraction. But I imagine that what draws an increasing number of black artists like Chase—or contemporaries Janiva Ellis and Tschabalala Self, who also create distorted, interlocking figures high on desire—to the medium is its staying power. Painting has proven to be one of the best vehicles to enshrine in the public imagination who we think matter and should be remembered. Like most art except black music, as the filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa argues, painting has routinely left out of its gilded frames the beauty, alienation, and soul of black folx that get at the truth of who we are. A Jonathan Lyndon Chase painting gives black queer men, like myself, who have stood in museums where narrow representations are given pride of place and are commonly heralded as universal expressions, an opportunity for real reflection and dreaming. In his works in which multiple actions abound in the space of one figure, “he suggests something that has happened in the past, something that's happening now, and something that is yet to come inside of the figure(s),” the artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden wrote on the occasion of Chase's Quiet Storm exhibition. It's a collapsing of space that allows for black gay men to see what they have rarely been afforded: a way of standing securely in the present while seeing both the comfort of a rich history and the promise of a lucent future.
A convincing argument can be made that, in his use of color and composition, Chase's paintings employ an easy command of historical precedents, from Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon to Alice Neel. But it is also true that he paints with a rough yet whimsical realism that is not found in art school. In works such as 2 trade bois (2019), a painting of two gay males with purple fades merging into one against a gold sky, he applies their formal lessons and expands on them with great care and consideration for his community. He adds what he calls a “high sexual energy” that brings to the fore a fleeting sense of black gay desire and a lived experience that's entirely his own.
“I'm a '90s kid,” Chase says, and in his art, there is “just, like, this element of real or not real.” He laces his canvases with a wide array of influences found in the bombastic colors of postwar abstraction, the murals that decorate Philly, Timberland boots, meat that functions as a metaphor for the conspicuous consumption of black bodies, pain, and joy by white society. His abstracted scenes also feature what he has witnessed with his own eyes of black men and women flirting, playing and courting on the block; Looney Tunes characters; and the construction and color palettes of the fashions found at Forman Mills, a regional discount retailer. “I think a lot of it, for me, is that it's really accessible and when something just feels right,” he adds.
Like Mickalene Thomas and Jordan Casteel, Chase paints from photographs, many of which are collected into large black binders that are found in his disorderly workspace. He collages them digitally before he takes to canvas to create the painterly narratives that displace assumptions that fetishize black male bodies as aggressive, hypermasculine, and overly sexual. Paintings such as 3 graces of Olney (2018), where the figures are entangled both physically and sexually, allude to how Chase sees his career as a way to create space for reconsidering what black male sexuality and masculinity might mean from the perspective of a black gay man. There is no shame or respectability on the canvases, only black gay men living messy lives, in which they are fighting to love one another, against odds, despite themselves.
Chase's work fits into a few-decades-long debate in American art that was brought into the museum by the celebrated curator and director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Thelma Golden. In the essay “My Brother,” for her seminal 1994 Whitney Museum exhibition, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, she writes, “One of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century is the African-American male—‘invented’ because black masculinity represents an amalgam of fears and projections in the American psyche which rarely conveys or contains the trope of truth about the black male's existence.” The exhibition included black gay artists such as Glenn Ligon, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Fred Wilson, who all created works that challenged popular racist and homophobic representations of both gay and straight black men.
Following that generation of '90s artists, a new group of black male artists, like the painter Kehinde Wiley, sought to rethink what it means to give black men power and sexiness on the canvas in the early 2000s. Chase and the black queer artists who are making their concerns known now, such as the photographers Shikeith and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, the painter Devan Shimoyama, and the weaver Diedrick Brackens, have taken up the task in even more explicit ways than their predecessors did. In many of Chase's paintings, he takes as subject the naked black male body. In works such as touch me (2017), an oil-stick drawing of a nude bottom whose sagging pants reveal a throbbing asshole, the body parts long considered taboo—the black male penis and butt—are an “entryway” into considering the interiority of black queer men. In many of his paintings, the asshole seems like a portal by which to enter the intimate universe of the figures portrayed, and the way in which to read pleasure, in ways both vulnerable and soft, in each of the bodies represented.
“Our bodies are more expansive, and they extend beyond our penises,” Chase says. And his preference to load his scenes with butts and assholes and men who enjoy anal play is about the way black men have been routinely reduced to just their penises in the white imagination, typified in art by Robert Mapplethorpe's infamous black-and-white photograph Man in Polyester Suit (1980). “So it's about the penis, but then it's not,” Chase says of his work. “It's more about a sort of softness and that bottoms, I think, should get more props. It's hard work!” In his wanton imagery, bodily fluids also sometimes run freely. “Bodies are gross,” he declares, before revealing why he's most attracted to painting them: “I'm after trying to talk about how bodies are complicated. It's definitely having to do with desirability and being unapologetic and being raw and just sort of—we're human.” He says, “I think sometimes we forget through everything we go through that it's okay to just sort of like fucking or to like sex, and there's more than one way to do it.”
Chase and his peers' art exists in a post-Moonlight culture and account for that change and the expanding definitions of sexuality, gender, and blackness. They seem keen on addressing, in their images, a question that still lingers after Moonlight: How much sexuality is a black gay man allowed to have in mainstream art? Currently we barely have any, just suggestions of it—say, in the way the camera, while two of us kiss during an onscreen sex scene, dramatically pans toward the window or up a wall in a dark bedroom. That is, if there is a sex scene at all in what is supposed to be a love story. Looking at Chase's sexed-up canvases, where black men blissfully eat ass, suck dick, and butt-fuck, because that's what happens in nature—it's what black men who love other black men, for a day or a lifetime, do—I ask the question that has been roiling the black gay community since October 2016: Should Chiron and Kevin have fucked in act three of Moonlight?
“I’m so happy you brought that up,” Chase says. “I was kinda disappointed. It was so authentic, a lot of the scenes—a lot of it was beautiful. But nothing is above criticism, I guess, and this is where it comes in: The most human thing they could’ve done is fuck.” I am relieved, and he continues: “We have this large canon of heterosexual or cisgender fucking, expressing their love, on TV. It’s like, ‘Whoa! We have this movie Moonlight,’ right? But then it’s like, ‘Whoa…,’ ” he says, lowering his voice with disappointment. “I’m really interested in showing that kind of love. That kind of fucking. Because it’s been so absent and erased.”
A few weeks after we spoke, FX’s queer drama, Pose, delivered. Pray Tell and Ricky, two black gay male characters on the show, flip fuck. In the scene, a mawkish Ricky slides into Pray Tell’s bed. Pray Tell asks, “What are you doing?” “I think I have a thing for you,” says Ricky cornily, before kissing him. The cameras stay on them as they go through the motions. It is a small way of returning to them a sense of the humanity Chase has devoted himself to painting, that is chipped away when your rights are up for debate casually and constantly. It is exactly the representation we deserve.
I notice on Chase’s hands, legs, arms, and neck the cartoon-like figures of black queer men found in his paintings. “Some are for shows,” he says of the 17 or so black illustrations that dot his body, mapping out the story of his life. There’s one that honors the memory of his grandmother, who died last year at the age of 78; others of his art that account for finishing graduate school, his recent solo exhibitions Sheets and Quiet Storm; flowers, because “they’re really colorful”; and others for overcoming battles with depression and suicide. He has yet to add one to commemorate the recent inclusion of four paintings in his first museum exhibition, Semblance: The Public/Private/Shared Self, a group show that puts his work in conversation with artists Doron Langberg and Heidi Hahn at the Louisiana State University Museum of Art. He balls his left hand into a fist to reveal the word “sad” written on his knuckles. “It was supposed to be ‘joy’ and ‘sad,’ but the ‘joy’ came off, and I was like, ‘This is too real!’ ” he says, laughing.
He takes off his shirt to show me that inked in the middle of his chest and living under the words “Soft Boy” is a male figure drawn by him but made by his cousin, who has tattooed most of his body. The figure resembles the number 8, which alludes to what the artist calls “pleasure points” of the body. The upper circle shows a head covered in a baseball cap, and the lower one, the body, where the only discernible feature is the figure’s ass. I know it because there is a small droplet of black ink that is suggestive of an asshole. “I do render my assholes a lot with just, like, a black hole inside or, like, a target.” It’s not about violence or at least the spilling of blood for Chase, where his works sometimes give off the impression of cannibalism. According to the painter, that should be read in his pictures “as an act of endearment and getting so close to someone that you’re morphing with them.” But “as far as violence, I just talk about, like, sort of mental things and repercussions of homophobia, transphobia, racism.”
The next morning, over an early breakfast at Marathon Grill in downtown Philadelphia, Chase explains to me that the rawness of his work has allowed success to come fast but not without missteps. He notes that between completing undergrad at the University of the Arts in 2013 and graduate school, he sold his art for $50 a pop on Tumblr and had his first solo show, Rosebud, in Philadelphia, at the Lord Ludd gallery.
I ask, how long before the New York art world started calling? “Okay, let me drink…,” he says dramatically, sipping from the smoothie he ordered. I ask if he had any bad experiences? “I’m not one to gossip or anything like that, but I try to be real,” he says earnestly. “I was used. I was fucking stolen from!” he declares.
Despite any negative experiences, though, Chase has not been deterred. His work has since caught the attention of important mega-dealers, like Emmanuel Perrotin and Jeffrey Deitch. They have both presented his work in their galleries in group shows featuring some of today’s hottest young painters. Private collectors have also been eager to snap up Chase’s work for their homes. Bernard Lumpkin, who is a trustee at the Studio Museum in Harlem and serves on acquisition committees at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, owns four of Chase’s paintings. “I think with African-American art, there are traditionally conservative strains,” Lumpkin tells me, sitting on a couch in his Tribeca loft. He points to the long tradition of black portraiture where figures like Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Kerry James Marshall have focused almost exclusively on positive aspects of black life. “What Jonathan Lyndon Chase is doing is taking it a couple of steps further,” Lumpkin explains. “He’s knocking down two walls at the same time: the wall of black representation but also the wall that has hidden works representing queer experience in the black community from view.”
At the 2019 Armory Show, in March in New York City, his former Los Angeles dealer, Kohn Gallery, sold four large-scale paintings to major museums, including the Walker Art Center and ICA Miami, right as the art fair opened. This past May at the 2019 edition of Frieze New York, his current dealer, Company Gallery, presented an installation of his paintings, drawings, and sculptures called Aisle 8, which explored the kitchen and supermarket as charged sites of gender performance. On some fake grass inside the booth, Chase laid down fat slabs of sculpted meat. It’s a common trope he uses in his work to explore “connotations of what it’s like to be fetishized” and “like a metaphorical thing—just thinking about how fragile we are because we’re meat,” he explains. It is also partly the reason we see a lot of black men sagging their pants in his work. They are showing off their asses as a way to peacock a fledgling masculinity. The presentation was awarded the Frame Prize, the fair’s top prize for emerging galleries.
“Jonathan is one of the most powerful voices among a generation of young queer artists who are unapologetically expressing their experiences and desires with a new kind of sexual and emotional candor,” explains Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney Museum’s chief curator, who told me the museum recently acquired Run away with me (2019). “What makes his art so powerful is the way he portrays his subjects with a level of formal invention that amplifies its psychic intensity. Through the beautiful distortions of the figures and his sensitive touch, you really feel physical contact and longing among men with an intimacy that’s both personal and universal.”
Before breakfast wraps up and Chase has to run around the block to a therapy appointment, we talk about his new projects beyond painting. He’s trying his hand at fiction this fall. “It’s like science fiction, fantasy,” he says, about the book that will be published by Capricious. It is inspired by the speculative literature of the black authors Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, who helped define the genre. He won’t tell me the title of the book but says it is set on a space station and centers on two protagonists, an interior designer and a photographer, in an open, nonlinear narrative and includes aspects of his drawings. “One of them is pregnant,” he explains. “They’re both kind of like male-presenting but femme, so not to give away too much, but there’s an evil demonic entity that is trying to sort of take over the couple’s baby,” he says.
Chase also has plans for a project in the home-goods sphere. Though he doesn’t want to reveal anything publicly just yet, he says: “I’m looking to be like gay black Martha Stewart.”
This does not mean there won’t be more paintings. Chase will also be showing at galleries and art fairs around the world. In September he was included in a group show at New York’s Hauser & Wirth and Mitchell-Innes & Nash galleries. He is riveted by the challenge to once again put black queer figures, emboldened with his dreams and fears, down on the canvas. Each show will be yet another opportunity for Chase to give gay black men back to themselves. He has to fight to stay true to his ideas and, as he put it to me back in his studio, “just make work—it sounds corny as fuck—intuitively, through the heart.”
Antwaun Sargent is a writer and critic living in New York City. His first book, ‘The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion,’ is out now from Aperture.
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2019 issue with the title "The Naked Ambition Of Jonathan Lyndon Chase."
