Left: Jonathan Worcester, “Untitled,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 61 1/2″ x 48″; right: Michelle Grabner, “Untitled” (XL Ham Can #1, #2, #3), 2024, silver leaf on ten-pound ham cans, 9″ x 9″ x 12″/Photo: Old Friends
Old Friends is a new gallery. It’s compact, clean and well-lit. It opened its North Paulina Street doors in March. Its director, Delia Pelli-Walbert is warm, inviting and easy to talk to. She’s from New York. She also spent time at a gallery in L.A., but now she’s at home in Chicago. The river usually flows the other way. The gallery’s current show is “Ambulance Chase.” It features works by Peter Fagundo, Michelle Grabner and Jonathan Worcester. Curated by gallerist and Newcity contributor Bianca Bova, each artist is represented by three well-chosen works.
In the main gallery, Jonathan Worcester’s incandescent artifacts scintillate. Large, colorful, and a little “bossy,” the small strokes that comprise them push the body around, forcing you to take them in up close, from far away, and up close again. Best described as electrified ripples meandering across the surface of a fluorescent pond, or a page from a book of magic eye images, they’re complicated. Like moiré patterns that invite contemplation, the eye scans their untitled surfaces, directed toward something to grab ahold of, a buoy or lighthouse to guide the way. But there’s nothing there, just as you feel an object coming into focus, it slips away again. The pleasure is in the hunt.
Peter Fagundo, “Chuncho,” 2024, oil on canvas, 36″ x 48″/Photo: Old Friends
Perhaps on account of the representational imagery it appropriates and repositions, Peter Fagundo’s work is easier to come to terms with. Tableau-like in execution, his works draw together paintings of Helmut Newton photographs and expressive abstract forms mise-en-abyme. They’re punctuated by portraits, pentimeti, and painterly flourishes. Fagundo is an artist whose propensity for chameleon-like stylistic shifts coupled with technical prowess exude a love for the material of paint as paint, but also as an analogue for flesh. And while the paintings in “Ambulance Chase” don’t reach the level of overt sexuality that some of his past work has, there is an undeniable sexiness to them.
Michelle Grabner’s contributions are perhaps the greatest challenge to the conventional viewer. Admittedly, I have never been able to “see” Grabner’s work very clearly. The artist’s paintings are often compositionally repetitive and wrapped in a kind of “aw-shucks” visual domesticity that I have never been able to tell if earnest or ironic. I’ve accepted that her work sits somewhere inaccessible to me, past the keyless locked-door of my aesthetic blind spot. The extra-large, silver-leafed canned ham tins in the show however are genuinely funny, as if they are a kind of running commentary on both the show and themselves. In their own way, these sacred/secular objects also make the most direct reference to contemporary events that occur outside the confines of the gallery.
Michelle Grabner, “Untitled” (XL Ham Can #1, #2, #3), 2024, silver leaf on ten-pound ham cans, 9″ x 9″ x 12″/Photo: Old Friends
“Ambulance Chase” is a gratifying show; pleasant to look at, equal parts funny and thoughtful. Although it’s one whose curatorial premise I admit to not really understanding. The exhibition text discusses an “ambulance chaser” within the context of personal injury lawyers and of running toward disaster. I think of an ambulance chaser as someone trying to take advantage of the misery of others. Like many of you, the legitimacy crises that our social, cultural and governmental institutions have irrevocably spiraled into has made me miserable, and economically, I feel taken advantage of. But are these artists courting disaster? This show is anything but.
“Ambulance Chase” is on view at Old Friends, 3405 North Paulina, through November 16.
