GEOFFREY CHADSEY

Michael Benevento is proud to present New York based artist Geoffrey Chadsey’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Sly glancer, Angry dancer. 

 In striking psychological and virtuosic renderings, Chadsey deepens his longstanding interest in fraught masculinity and queer subject-hood. Made over the past three years, the drawings included in this exhibition were created using water-soluble pencil, watercolor crayon, powdered graphite and flashe on mylar. The portraits are composite figures of men, male-adjacent or masculine-aspirant figures from Chadsey’s expansive visual archive. Chadsey’s approach to composition is distinct—reminiscent of the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse based surprising juxtapositions, Chadsey’s figures stand before you in all their complexity—ostentatious, anxious, eager, abject or aloof. These figures present themselves in various states of peacockery, wanting to be marveled at, or regarded with admiring disgust.

The contours of Chadsey’s characters are lovingly rendered, but their bodies have not settled into a final form. Lines wrap the body, emphasizing the physicality of the skin wrapped around muscle and bone, while also capturing an indeterminacy, a fidgeting: a body that seeks change. These men try on the bodies of others, masked with other faces, cannibalizing poses; an unstable hologram trying to embody whatever fantasies are organized under a description called masculinity. What gets depicted here are accumulations. This melancholic figure grabs the bodies, appearances, attires of others in order to appear whole. A paper doll suspended and embellished with conflicting identities. One is reminded of the scramble suits from Philip K. Dick’s paranoid masterpiece, A Scanner Darkly, their surface an ever-flickering projection of other people, but here not as a disguise, but more of a frantic proposal: How about this? How about that? Not this, or that either. 

Ocean Vuong described in an interview “how a preordained version of masculinity is actually so narrow that no one truly fits in and thrives. It becomes a cartoonish demand and any person male or female (because masculinity of course is a performance) that enters that sort of [gender] factory, rarely comes out with all of themselves intact. And I think that is the demand of the brutal social standard, that if you want to ‘fit in’, want to assimilate, what will you lose, what are you prepared to lose?” 

Working between nostalgia and the contemporary, portraiture and abstraction, pop culture, fantasy and hyper-reality, Chadsey finds beauty in reimagining masculinity.