Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s work is built around a reflection on memory as an embodied experience, on identity as a relational process and on belonging as a lived space. Philadelphia, the artist’s hometown, becomes the vantage point from which to observe and convey an affective geography made up of homes, physicality and relationships.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase, “Keep thinking nobody does it like you here comes the sunset”, installation view at Gió Marconi, Milan, photo: Fabio Mantegna, courtesy the artist and Gió Marconi, Milan
In Keep thinking nobody does it like you here comes the sunset, solo exhibition at Galleria Gió Marconi, the domestic dimension emerges as a narrative and symbolic engine, transforming the exhibition space into an inhabited, deeply human environment. The recurring elements in the artist’s work are intimate, recognizable spaces – above all, spaces that feel alive. The same is true for the body: imperfect, roughly sketched, fragile, laid bare. Chase paints and sculpts figures and environments through a continuous deepening, where the home is not merely a physical space but layered time, and the body becomes an archive that holds memory.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase, “Keep thinking nobody does it like you here comes the sunset”, installation view at Gió Marconi, Milan, photo: Fabio Mantegna, courtesy the artist and Gió Marconi, Milan
In constant relation between inside and outside, the figures that populate the paintings are anti-conventional, real and rarely seen. The artist’s practice challenges the toxic masculinity of the male body – idealized and romanticized – as well as narratives that ridicule difference, which is instead an expression of our uniqueness. In his paintings and sculptures, Chase seeks to strip the human figure of its everyday rigidity, allowing its particularities to be emphasized. In Chase’s work, the body is never only individual: it is queer and political. Confident and free, the subjects inhabit an intimate, vulnerable and at times sexual everyday life, far removed from any form of idealization. Intimacy, never neutral, becomes here a form of resistance and a presence of Black and queer life – solid and affirmed within spaces that have historically denied it. The world composed by Chase rarely leaves their subjects alone: they read together, cook, move through the city, shop, meet and seek one another. Relationship, more than the individual, becomes the core of the work.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase, “Keep thinking nobody does it like you here comes the sunset”, installation view at Gió Marconi, Milan, photo: Fabio Mantegna, courtesy the artist and Gió Marconi, Milan
The paintings intentionally retain a sketch-like quality, visually fragile and emotionally charged, where flatness and three-dimensionality intermingle. The exterior settings depicted – such as the cars on which figures lean, the shoe store, or the church – become thresholds: places of passage where the intimacy of the body is exposed, tested and redefined within the urban fabric. Meanwhile, the interiors of the homes that take shape within monochrome fields – alternating between phosphorescent and dark tones – exist on the same plane as the body. Some are disordered, marked by time and by leaks from ceilings or faucets; others are ordinary and composed, like their furnishings.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase, “Keep thinking nobody does it like you here comes the sunset”, installation view at Gió Marconi, Milan, photo: Fabio Mantegna, courtesy the artist and Gió Marconi, Milan
The gallery itself is transformed into a welcoming and never-neutral environment: the sculptural works Power Bottom Table (2025) and Tattoed Jawn (2025) become bases for glass-topped tables. Chase works with the soft surfaces of fabrics and ceramics, activating a direct sensory relationship: surfaces, volumes and objects evoke touch, inviting the viewer to enter into relation with the bodies represented.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase, “Keep thinking nobody does it like you here comes the sunset”, installation view at Gió Marconi, Milan, photo: Fabio Mantegna, courtesy the artist and Gió Marconi, Milan
The gallery becomes a house chromatically inhabited by black, white, and light blue – a sequence of emotional rooms and traces of labor. The presence of paint cans left in plain sight, of sculptural faucets shaped like human figures or drawn directly onto the walls, suggests a space in constant transformation, crossed by a continuous flow. Water, a recurring element in the exhibition, becomes a metaphor for movement, care and memory, evoking the idea of a lived-in home. Within this welcoming yet never-neutral dwelling, the viewers enter as guests, carrying with them the experience of a shared intimacy that continues to resonate.
Info:
Jonathan Lyndon Chase. Keep thinking nobody does it like you here comes the sunset
29/01/2026 – 18/03/2026
Gió Marconi Gallery
Via Tadino 15, Milano
www.giomarconi.com
Alessia D’introno has a degree in Visual Arts and is currently attending the two-year specialist course in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, NABA, Milan. She writes for the print and online magazine Juliet Art Magazine. Her critical work focuses on the demolition of historical paradigms to which Italy and Europe have been linked for centuries. The de-colonial practice of her research develops a comparison and an openness towards new methodologies and possibilities.
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