Everyone’s Lusting After Jonathan Lyndon Chase
By Owen Lach
Philadelphia-based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase is one of the most sought after painters from a growing pool of young, queer, POC artists. His lush, colorful, mixed-media depictions of often taboo subjects – sex, queerness, and the black male body – are energetic in a way that seem the set the still images in motion.
The queer, black, non-binary artist produces work that belies the centuries old Western traditions of figure painting, showing bodies that aren’t representative of privilege, whiteness, and heteronormativity. His depictions of lust, nakedness, and sex go offer a raw glimpse into the realities of marginalized identities that have historically been overlooked the the art word.
“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,” said Chase in a recent interview. “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.”
Despite this, or, possibly, as a result of this, Chase’s work has been deservedly finding its way over the past few years into museums, exhibitions, and galleries around the country.
