Downpour is something that happens, suddenly, fast and very unexpectedly. I see this very much as how the concept of change or transformation behaves in our daily lives.

– Jonathan Lyndon Chase

At Sadie Coles HQ Bury Street, Jonathan Lyndon Chase has made an exhibition of new paintings using the umbrella as prop and metaphor. In Downpour the umbrella becomes a refuge, veiling and cloaking figures caught in storms or torrents of rain. In each painting, water acts as a destructive and cleansing force, evoking grief, meditation and transformation. The umbrella, as a performative device, offers both a barrier and gateway between the body and the liminal space where interior and exterior converge. Serving as a fragment of the domestic, the protective structure fluidly carries a personal space into the external world.

Lyndon Chase has repeatedly used interiors – private domestic spaces, hidden alleys, windows into the bedroom – as the backdrop to depict a diaristic narrative. In this latest body of work, lone figures gaze outward from their facade of privacy, coyly glancing outward. Other characters invite companions into their guarded perimeter, painted in conversational confidence or passionate embrace. The paintings are rich with intimacy, tension and innuendo, offering a means of reclamation and empowerment as the subjects venture outside to face the potential hostility of a newly judgemental society. Eruptions of lightning, fertile vegetation and swollen raindrops surround the interlocked figures. Lyndon Chase’s subjects may avert the gaze of the viewer, but they also permit the voyeurism of private moments of longing, lust and on occasion, loneliness.

Lyndon Chase illustrates their view that our interaction with space is fundamental to the human experience, made tangible through the body as a vessel. They urge us to consider the figures on display, their surrounding environment and the connection between queerness and nature, as well as our own personal relationship with our bodies and how we inhabit space. Downpour expands the canon of Black Queer storytelling and image-making, an intention deeply embedded in much of Lyndon Chase’s work, providing a sanctuary where the tender familiarity of fellowship becomes a form of activism.