‘Just because you’re getting older, doesn’t mean you’re doing it better. But you can’t stop, either, or you’ll be lost. So you go ahead, even though you don’t know where you are going, because you never know. You only know how to leave from where you’ve been.’ — Willem de Kooning, 1983

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M. LeBlanc is proud to present a unique two-person exhibition. Opening this Saturday, September 28th from 5 to 8pm, ‘Ours Is The Hand That Sews Time’, features new paintings from father and son, Peter Fagundo and Jake Fagundo. Working individually, both Fagundos present painting not as a product with its parameters set to an end, but rather as the outcome of a living process. The Fagundos endeavor toward a form of realism that's increasingly rare today. Painting is not an end, but an offspring.

Raised in Colorado and Minnesota, Peter Fagundo first came to Chicago in the late 90’s, and began attending graduate school at the School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago in 2000. His son Jake was barely three years old.

A product of the 70s and 80s, Peter Fagundo grew up looking for meaning in a lapsed Catholic, new age spiritual home. He recalls a coffee table encyclopedic book– ‘Five Hundred Centuries of Art’– containing the standard canon of Western painting from cave illustrations in Lascaux to Pollock and the New York School of abstraction. However, despite having a steady habit of drawing and painting as a teenager, Fagundo would study economics and psychology, only hearing his calling to paint well after his undergraduate years. Now a long-time associate adjunct professor at the school that graduated him (SAIC), Fagundo is deeply admired, especially in Chicago, for his perspective and approach to making contemporary art.

For the last couple of years, Peter Fagundo’s practice oscillates between two distinct highly prolific series. The first includes canvases simply divided into smaller ‘paintings of paintings.’ Text paintings, abstract paintings, nudes, and figurative tableaux comprise the pictorial plane, causing one to visually hold multiple ‘works’, and a whole singular work as well. Much of each paintings’ content is appropriated from drawings or scraps of text Fagundo made and saved for years. The process is one of amalgamation and an attempt to disentangle his drive to make both figurative and abstract works.

His second series in the exhibition are the direct and intuitive painted appropriations of photographs by the late German photographer Helmut Newton. Working from a number of oversized publications of the works of the acclaimed Berlin photographer, Fagundo selects an image and employs it as a readymade subject. Sensual and moody, Newton’s photographs are swiftly transposed by Fagundo’s hand, working deftly wet-into-wet with surgical realist precision. 

The resulting work is one of daily repetition, of a near daily repeating of a photograph as a painting. As the works amass in number and scale, we find it's a simple engine that drives Fagundo's cosmology for creating the work. With this collision between the ritualized nature of their production and the inherently gratifying cinematic noir nature of Newton’s content, Fagundo positions the work as a casual ace,  a hack, and a bit of a laugh at pleasure - the pleasure of painting, and the joy we can share in it together.

A child of the early 2000’s and the son of a painter, Jake Fagundo parsed meaning from a stale slipstream of neo-avant garde aesthetics, art school, and the dominance of the internet as a social platform and recycler of images.

A quarter century younger than his father, but with an inherited allergy for the limitations of a singular signature aesthetic, Fagundo trots out historical references as quickly as they are disposed of, whether it be Maria Lassnig, Martin Kippenberger, or Walter Swennen – Fagundo is unapologetic and abashedly curious as he casts a constellation of canonical markers to signal what he values and the predecessors whose work speaks to how he understands the role of contemporary painting. In larger works, Fagundo contemplates material nuances of genre–  hard edge, broad gesture, and field vs. ground. Elsewhere, he works through form. Like his father, Fagundo’s figurative work involves found imagery– here, masks, Easter Island heads, aliens. Two modes: representation and abstraction, often at odds, are brought together as a conceptual scheme, foregrounding artistic production, and painting in general, as the ruling strategy.

It is evident that Fagundo endeavors to whittle down on his own terms - the two most enduring questions for a painter - how to paint and what to paint. Traditionally rhetorical questions for modern painters, and not unlike his father, Jake Fagundo's work strikes out at the mutable nature of meaning and the onus placed on art making to provide any existential answers outside of lived experience.

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Peter Fagundo (American, b. 1971 in St. Cloud, MN) lives and works in Chicago. For the past twenty years Peter has exhibited throughout the nation. Graduating from SAIC’s painting department with an MFA in 2002, Peter formed The Pond, a curatorial collaborative in Wicker Park, whose storefront program was mutually curated by Fagundo, curator Jeff M. Ward, and fellow artists David Coyle and Howard Fonda. Fagundo exhibited this early work primarily at Chicago gallerist Shane Campbell’s recently established boom., in the city’s Oak Park neighborhood, and made numerous projects with The Suburban, Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam's Oak Park coach house. Throughout the 2000s, Fagundo exhibited at The Renaissance Society, Hyde Park Art Center, early LA Chinatown gallery Acuna Hansen, Hudson Franklin in New York, and Dan Devening here in Chicago. Fagundo’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago and numerous private and corporate collections.

Jake Fagundo (American, b. 1997 in Chicago) lives and works in Los Angeles. Fagundo received his Bachelor of FIne Art degree in 2021 from the School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago. Relocating to Los Angeles after graduation, Fagundo has exhibited regularly, most recently in 'Something Bit Me Bad' (2024) (curated by Grunts Rare Books) at Temple Projects in Los Angeles, ‘There Before Time’ (2024) at Imperial Gallery in Los Angeles, ‘Sprezzatura’ (2024) (curated by Grant Edward Tyler) at AS IT STANDS in Los Angeles, 'No Time Like The Present' (2023) at Praz-Delavallade in Los Angeles, and ‘INNOCENCE’ (2021) at SULK CHICAGO.