Six painters contribute significant large-scale works to a dynamic group show comprising a range of aesthetics, styles and narrative strategies, all centered around representations of the male figure, especially men of color. In Disembodiment, curator Mariane Ibrahim is committed to an updated canon which recognizes that a universe of stories and styles exists, created by black artists, depicting people, that are nevertheless not engaged — or, not only — in a dialog on identity. Instead, or additionally, these artists are advancing a broad, diverse and robust conversation with the very notion of portraiture across art history and fine art technique.
Read MoreToward the end of his residency at the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life program, I travel to visit the studio of visual artist, Jarvis Boyland. “Hey Kootie K,” we greet each other with an embrace, as I enter the room and unload. Located across the street from the Garfield Green Line station in Chicago’s Southside, the studio is filled with the warmth of a long-awaited summer. Sheer splats of fuschia paint on the walls are leftover from a body of work that debuted earlier this spring in “On Hold,” his first solo-exhibition at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles
Read MoreThere’s something different about Jarvis Boyland’s work. Walking the exhibition rooms of Los Angeles’ Kohn Gallery — where Boyland’s “On Hold:” exhibit is on view through Thursday, May 23 — I was arrested by his portraits of Black queer men. Though simple and straightforward, there’s a complexity in the color story, particularly in his subject’s skin tones. They were rich and nuanced and complex, both imagined and realistic, and unlike any paintings I’ve come into contact with.
Read MoreDiva painting might be its own notable genre, given such exceptional practitioners as Kurt Kauper and Marilyn Minter. Their work doesn’t merely show as vivid, dramatic subject matter an array of imperious opera singers, fashion models, Hollywood icons at home or sex-tape-style celebrities-in-the-making. Instead, it forthrightly asserts that, in an era in which any form of art-making is possible, painting is a diva too.
Read MoreBoyland’s most outstanding pieces focus on intimate portraits of queer, black men in the comfort of domestic settings, free from the prejudices which follow them throughout their life. Although relaxed, by deconstructing their anxieties, the men are inherently defiant in their abode. On Saturday, April 6th, Kohn Gallery opened On Hold:, an exhibition, which, in conjunction with NY-based artist Heidi Hahn's stellar show, Burn Out in Shredded Heaven, continues on until May 23rd. Flaunt had the lovely opportunity to chat with Boyland on his experiences growing up in the South, the inspiration behind his work, and the power behind portraiture.
Read MoreJarvis Boyland came of age in the era of marriage equality but also of tragedies like the Pulse nightclub shooting and high-profile cases of police brutality. So if you sense a certain anxiety underpinning the Memphis-born 24-year-old’s dream-like depictions of black queer home life, you aren’t imagining it. “I’m into the staging of the domestic and what these scenes of leisure can evoke,” he says. His 2017 painting Feels Like We Only Go Backwards (Pulse) captures such a moment, at once quotidian and miraculous. “Pulse is me awakening to the possibilities of building a life with a queer partner in Chicago — something I couldn’t do in the South.”
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