The gaze of a Greco-Roman bust fixes on a figure ostentatiously shrouded in layers of bright fabric. A pool of black matter, reflective like latex, mars a living room floor. A couple poses in front of an irradiant sunset, their faces concealed by masks. A lonely, biomorphic form rests on a lush forest floor. Such images saturate painter Chris Fallon’s world, in which the gaping maw of melodrama swallows the austere, the antique, and the refined. Under the Vast Indifference, the Landing’s first exhibition with the artist, presents nine new acrylic paintings that challenge the distinctions between figure and object, interiority and exteriority, fantasy and reality.

The exhibition develops Fallon’s longstanding interest in the practice of collecting as a tool for shaping one’s sense of self. Previous bodies of work often represent subjects situated on walls replete with objects such as African masks and reproductions of famous works of Western art. Through such juxtapositions, Fallon explores how the accumulation of goods helps construct the self—and how aesthetic sensibility, rather than being a pure mode of self-expression, is shaped by cultural norms.

In Under the Vast Indifference, Fallon transports his figures away from the wall, immersing them within phantasmagoric interior and exterior atmospheres. While discussing the exhibition, Fallon referred to the “plurality of subjectivities” he offers within each canvas, a plurality which decenters the figure as the primary vehicle for emotionality and meaning within a picture. The paintings often adhere to a kind of collage logic, wherein figures (or, using Fallon’s term, “mannequins”) juxtapose objects, emphasizing their difference rather than their similarity. The foreground of Reeducation, for instance, presents books, antiquarian sculptures, and an orange on a marble surface, producing a reverie of Mediterranean sophistication. The background, however, introduces an unresolvable mystery into the scene, as one figure bites their lip seductively, while another crouches surreptitiously, cloaked in red cloth.

Portraits of discomposure erupt throughout Fallon’s new body of work. In addition to probing how collecting aids identity construction, the new paintings trade on vexed identification, disavowing any stable sense of interiority. Overburdened by the specter of their perceptibility, they often shield their eyes—the purported “window to the soul”—from the viewer, short-circuiting our access to any hidden, authentic self. In The Last Animal, for instance, a spotlight antagonizes a figure who stands theatrically in the foreground of the composition. Faced with the circular beam of bright light, they cower, using their hand to shield their eyes and contorting their ruby red lips into a grimace. They refuse to accede to the spotlight’s compulsion to perform.

Figures seem caught or stuck within their environments throughout the exhibition. In The Believers, a nude figure with indigo skin stands with their back to the viewer and their arms raised as though apprehended for a crime. A shining black puddle bleeds like ink on the floor beneath. The figure is trapped within a network of gazes: Standing before them, a man in a white lab coat applies something to their body with a paint brush; and in the lower-right-hand corner of the frame, a third figure sits in a chair, beholding the unnerving scene. Elsewhere, this sense of entrapment issues through formal framing devices that emphasize a distance between subject and viewer, or subject and their surroundings. Fallon often uses architectural features of houses—windows, hallways, staircases—to create enclosures that augment an overall atmosphere of discomfort.

The tension between beauty and ugliness is central to my work. My hope is that the allure of the bold colors, arguable beauty, and cartoonish elements strike the viewer first, and that the darker underbelly reveals itself more upon closer inspection. Just like in real life.

(Chris Fallon)

Chris Fallon was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1976. Solo and two-person exhibitions of Fallon’s work have taken place at the Untitled Art Fair, with Masako Miki and CULT Aimee Friberg, in Miami, FL (2021); Irresistible Deception at CULT Aimee Friberg in San Francisco, CA (2021); Interiority and Other Objects at Park Life Gallery in San Francisco, CA (2020); Spring/Break Art Show in Los Angeles, CA (2020); and Each Other at Percy Gallery in Oakland, CA (2014). Group exhibitions that have shown Fallon’s work include the Seattle Art Fair, with CULT Aimee Friberg, in Seattle, WA (2022); NADA Miami in Miami, FL (2022) and NADA New York in New York, NY (2022) with the Landing Gallery; Thaw: Winter Group Show at Landing Gallery in Los Angeles, CA (2022); Janus—Seven Year Anniversary at CULT Aimee Friberg in San Francisco, CA (2021); and Sun Kissed Chokehold at Y53 in Los Angeles, California (2018). Fallon’s work is included in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archives in Los Angeles, CA. Fallon lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.