Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present You, and Other Unknowing Subjects, Geoffrey Chadsey’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Here Chadsey continues to create portraits of individuals and groups of gay men executed in watercolor-color pencil on mylar, and based on images culled from the internet. Chadsey’s drawings are other people’s self-portraits, often mashed up with materials from magazines, images from his own photo archives depicting friends and family, self-portraits, and views of his studio, filled with the detritus of his art practice. They are emblematic of today’s culture, treasures culled from hours spent alone in front of a computer.

Chadsey’s characters and resulting tableaus are hybrids between stereotypically incongruent worlds: drunk college dudes, preening boys, heroic nudes; the anonymous morphed with celebrity culture (cult characters from The Wire make appearances); the cartoonish, the prurient and the vulnerable? “It’s a drunk miscegenating queer world, filled with hostile effeminacy, macho posturing and primping, celebration, pleasure, and desire for another.”

Full of contrasts, the drawings are at once intimate and public in terms of their process, material, subject matter, and scale with works ranging from small studies to large-scale drawings. Chadsey describes his work as looking at photographs and his process as an uphill attempt to make a painting of a photograph with a pencil. His drawings, while appearing true to his photographic source material are impeccably drafted, yet decidedly handmade. Executed in lurid hues with watercolor pencils that are sharpened to tiny points, thee drawings are highly controlled and laborious to make. Chadsey balances this focused control with more expressionistic moments by liquefying marks on the page, creating sensual washes, softening some of the discomfort created by the peeping tom aspect of the images. They are beautiful to look at.

Chadsey is an excellent draftsman and his works are firmly situated in a long tradition of drawing and portraiture in art history. Works call to mind classical renaissance portraits, futurist painting, and the etchings of Gustave Dore. Contemporary artists with whom his work has an affinity include Nan Golden, Elizabeth Peyton, and Wolfgang Tilmans. Similarly Chadsey’s practice serves as a documentary of sorts, albeit and fictionalized and embellished one, his protagonists, from a particular culture, become subject to his inventions.

Geoffrey Chadsey earned his BA in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and his MFA from the California College of the Arts. His has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in the United States at numerous institutions including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, San Diego Museum of Art, CA, Exit Art, New York, NY, Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AK, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.