M. LeBlanc is proud to present A Promise Of Happiness, an exhibition of new work by James Krone. A Promise Of Happiness is Krone’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

In his most recent paintings, Matisse Dissociatives, Krone has sought to discover what might emerge from the act of painting when its subject is taken to be non-transferable. The works are predicated on a conviction that Matisse's paintings hinged on the necessity of a dissociative gaze. In the case of Matisse, the modern departure from functional representation owed not only to the disposing of cosmetic mimesis but, also, the philosophical realization that the subject was unavailable for the artist to offer in the form of a painting. Painting became a record of the artist's distance from the subject.

Whereas a Matisse painting is a document of his observation of a model or a still life and the occasion of that experience, for Krone the Matisse painting is the primary subject. Detached from an empirical link that would have been the source of their forms, these paintings develop their own terms, inform one another, conform to one another, as if independent of, perhaps at the expense of, the artist's subjectivity and the illusion of its coherence. If signs of artistic subjectivity were once received as modernist trophies, they are now more often perceived as a dubious, surfeit debris, a self-indulgent deposit with questionable gains; or, more fatalistically, as a way of locking oneself into a narrative by tracing the extent of one's limitations.

The Matisse Dissociatives are exhibited in relation to a series of photographs of pigeons, taken over the past few years. The pigeons are framed from a perspective that makes the Rorschach-like patterning of their back feathers most visible to the viewer. This position requires a complete diversion of the pigeon's gaze.

James Krone (American, b. 1975, Chicago) lives and works in Berlin. Upcoming and recent exhibitions include Wet Resistance at the Dortmunder Kunstverein (August, 2022), Dortmund, When There is No Laughing Matter Laughter Matters at the Halle für Kunst Lüneberg (2021), Lüneberg, Model of Dissolve at M. LeBlanc, Chicago (2019), The Wolf and the Head on Fire (with Dawn Kasper) at Portikus, Frankfurt (2019), Annunciations (as curator) at M. LeBlanc, Chicago (2018), Four Scores: From Zero to Nothing (with Dawn Kasper), David Lewis Gallery, New York (2018), An Ornithology for Birds at Kavi Gupta, Chicago (2016) and The Collapse of the Mind’s Ordering System Leads to Some rather Wanton Developments (curated by Alexi Kukuljevic), Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2016). Krone's work has been written about in various online and printed publications including Artforum, Mousse Magazine and Modern Painters.

For more information, please contact the gallery at info@mleblancchicago.com.