Max Protetch is pleased to announce Saul Chernick’s first solo exhibition, to be held in its Project Space. The Brooklyn-based artist will present ink drawings that depict Protosapia, an imaginary world invented by the artist in order to deal with a complex thematic structure that encompasses gender, religion, power and the creative impulse. Chernick describes Protosapia as “an Eden-like environment that serves as both laboratory and breeding ground for an alternate or `would-be’ human species. It is a place where ideas about creation, sexual politics, and iconography coalesce to create new possibilities.”

To depict this world, Chernick has taught himself the drawing techniques of the Northern Renaissance masters, along the way referencing the spectrum of reproduction in visual culture, from illuminated manuscripts to minted money to comic books. Inherent in his praxis is an investigation into the way power has been articulated via particular mark-making strategies. This labor-intensive technique has been employed to render the denizens of Protosapia in all their awkward glory. Cherubs sprung from Breugel or Dürer rendered as awkward, vulnerable beings; Zeus-like bearded old men caught in vain poses, seemingly obsessed with mortality; and skeletons and other images of death imbued with virile sexual appetites and renewed vigor: these are only a few of the beings Chernick has reimagined.

The drawings pose questions about Western monotheistic traditions and their visual portrayals of mortality and sexuality—just as they point toward the problems of representation and the role that illuminations, prints, and drawings have played throughout history. So often used to accompany supporting texts, so accustomed to playing second fiddle to paintings, in Chernick’s work the drawing is celebrated as a means of communicating information and visual pleasure and intricacy. And though the drawings are made up of thousands of lines, they inhabit their critical terrain in a way that is anything but linear, branching off in diagrammatic fashion to take on an entire constellation of issues.