M. LeBlanc, Chicago
Jonah Koppel, Mindy Rose Schwartz
LeBlanc presents the work of two Chicago-based artists, Jonah Koppel and Mindy Rose Schwartz. The exhibition draws from work that each artist produced over the past year, seeking out the visual and figurative shared sentiments between their practices. Jonah Koppel presents a suite of his framed drawings and paintings, then – aesthetically complimentary to his work, Mindy Rose Schwartz presents a series of wall-hanging bronze amulet pendants describing common animals.
Jonah Koppel’s paintings are about the relationship between the image and language. Inspired by the ancient Egyptian pictorial text of hieroglyphics – light source and perspective are abandoned for a world of symbols and geometry. For the past several years, Koppel centers these forms around mastering long-forgotten techniques of Venetian antiquity. Working in oil loaded with leaded crystal powder and wax, Koppel steadily, but playfully, produces stunning works that deftly play with the mechanics of image making and reflect on the collective evolution of seeing.
Improvised with great articulation from disparate elements of the artist’s imagination, the paintings travel through aesthetic and alchemical hinterlands to embody a lived process of how painting is seen and how autonomy in contemporary painting is continually defined, expanded, and redefined. Like free association in psychology, making an image for Koppel, consists of stringing together disparate elements from the imagination in order to form a cohesive picture.
In each work, the artist turns this process into a refined craft by keeping the work in a perpetual state of improvisation through to the end. In the way that a letter represents a sound, so too can a maze represent the cosmos. Koppel’s subject matter is typically natural phenomena – a sunset, a moonrise – formulated into a sentence of symbols that make a complete image, accessible to all, and without cultural signifiers or time-based relevance. Koppel’s paintings exist in the perpetual timeless present.
The works enjoy play between the pictorial meaning and abstract, designated meaning. When we gaze upon the world and see text, we see two things at once. Like the ancient Egyptians and their technology of hieroglyphics, works can be symbols, symbols can make images, and images can form sentences. Nature and text can be one.
For the past thirty years, Mindy Rose Schwartz has developed an extensive oeuvre of predominantly sculpture and installation that probes at the inherent connection – through memory primarily – that humans have to their objects. Of particular criticality to Schwartz’s body of work is her interest in the sentimentality and emotional attachment, performed or manufactured, by objects of kitsch or disposable mass-production.
For Art-o-rama 2024, Schwartz presents works from her series ALIEN HEAD KEYCHAINS (2001-2023), a series of small sculptures of aliens (and alien farm animals), cast in polished bronze and secured with lanyards to a variety of rings, keys, and occasional pieces of found material. While Schwartz series began two decades ago, the artist has recently reinvigorating the project and cast multiple new bronzes. Like the conflicting aesthetic impulses that distinguish much of her work, Held taut from multiple points of tension, the keychains are curious objects of aesthetic contemplation, somehow embedded with the emotional history of their imagined owners. Like many of the objects within Schwartz’s sculptural repertoire the keychains themselves, serve as mnemonic devices, recalling old sentiments and experiences of loss.
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