Peter Fagundo, “Bruca Manigua,” 2024, oil on canvas, 40″ x 30″/Photo: M. LeBlanc gallery
The twenty-nine paintings crowding the walls of the vast storefront gallery in Chicago’s Logan Square makes “Ours Is the Hand that Sews Time” much more than a winsome father-and-son exhibition. Instead, the exhibition is a passionate declaration on how the qualities of painting mature in performing daily practice. It also highlights the fundamental position that to be a painter means to work in close relationship with histories. In this exhibition, these histories are personal and familial but also broad and cultural. The genealogy on view tracks a bloodline through the histories of expressionism, portraiture, appropriation and conceptualism. There is a lot to be admired in this exhibition. It feels intimate and ethical. There are many standout paintings in this teeming offering, and yet there are also works that are unresolved and exploratory—even some paintings that are overworked and even corny.
Peter Fagundo is dogged, slogging it out for over twenty years in Chicago as a dedicated studio artist and a teacher. Peter Fagundo’s son, Jake Fagundo lives in Los Angeles and is a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who received a bachelor of fine art degree in 2021. They both share a traditional approach to painting, which is to say that oil on canvas or linen is their starting point. Although there are a few examples in the exhibition where Jake Fagundo employs enamel and polyester as well as oil painting.
Jake Fagundo, “Grey Matter,” 2024, oil on linen, 84″ x 78″/Photo: M. LeBlanc gallery
The front gallery space hosts four of Jake Fagundo’s paintings including “Grey Matter” (2024), a large cool-gray abstraction interrupted with a web of line work that threads the painting’s field with strands of color and directional energy. In addition to this Ab-Ex scaled anchor painting, three more paintings by Jake Fagundo take up residence. These paintings are strikingly vertical and each depict an aberrant figure: a skeleton with elongated arm and leg bones, and a skull sporting a set of prehistoric animal incisors; a crude antediluvian effigy; and cartoonish extraterrestrial. Purposeful promiscuity is a work in Jake Fagundo’s contributions and while subject matter is at the whims of his imagination, a cursory quickness in paint execution is consistent.
The long west wall that extends continuously between the gallery’s two main exhibition spaces is where twenty of Peter Fagundo’s medium- to small-size canvases reside. The dense salon-style hanging—although punctuated by eight of Jake Fagundo’s works—illustrates that Peter Fagundo is working with distinct conceptual frameworks. “Wavelength” (2024), “Bruca Manigua” (2024), and “No. 13 Baby” (2024) are examples from a series of paintings that appropriate images from books dedicated to the photographic work of Helmut Newton. Mostly monochromatic and moody, these figure compositions attempt to convey an objective attitude toward their source: reproductions of Newton’s pornographic-chic depiction of women (Susan Sontag accused Newton to his face of being a misogynist). The impasto brushwork in “Bruca Manigua” (2024) is limited to cadmium red paint and chromatic black. A luscious paint quality of the close-up depicting a wavy-hair female complete with smokey eye makeup and thick mascaraed lashes is as salacious as her protruding tongue.
Peter Fagundo, “Mr. Magic,” 2024, oil on canvas, 30″ x 40″/Photo: M. LeBlanc gallery
Intermingled with paintings appropriated from Newton’s soft porn are Peter Fagundo’s amalgamation compositions. This work deploys familiar postmodern strategies: repainting paintings within paintings. In short, Peter Fagundo is cannibalizing past work. “Mr. Magic” (2024) is a good example of this composite program where a discreet flower motif, a Philip Guston riff, and a reclining female nude occupy a single picture plane. Both reassessment and archiving transpire in these arrangements. And while it may be fair to bristle at the reworking of Helmut Newton’s misogyny, the varied conceptual agendas and painting tactics employed by both father and son in this bountiful exhibition is to be esteemed.
“Ours Is The Hand That Sews Time” by Peter Fagundo and Jake Fagundo is on view at M. LeBlanc, 3514 West Fullerton, through November 2.
