West, London
Danielle De Jesus
Made in Bushwick
Carl KostyálCarl Kostyál proudly presents Made in Bushwick, Danielle De Jesus’s first London solo exhibition and first show with the gallery. New York is allergic to nostalgia. A city where, in the words of one wag, specks of dust aspire to be grains of sand, the world’s financial capital constantly shape-shifts according to brute market forces, native and immigrant population swings and the economic cycles that drive their booms and busts—across otherwise rocklike boroughs, neighborhoods and streets. In a place where nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, rigorous remembering becomes a profoundly civic and aesthetic act. Enter artist Danielle De Jesus. A figure who combines the sweep of street photographer Helen Levitt and the intimate kitchen table portraiture of Alice Neel, her painterly, photographic and mixed-media artworks relay stories about New York that feature memorials of some of the city’s most colorful if least represented residents. Unsurprisingly, especially if we take seriously the idea that the world is a village—which we should in the wake of the twin scourges of social media and the pandemic—her efforts find sympathetic echoes in cities, towns and suburbs from New York to Nairobi to New Delhi, and back again. De Jesus’ most direct inspirations are images she harvests herself from the characters and sights animating her well-loved neighborhood. These are “images of home” she makes for herself, but that also serve as potential subjects for canvases containing the recent history of her embattled enclave. As she told one interviewer, “My paintings are based on images or, as Barkley Hendricks once described them, ‘photographic sketches’ that I’ve made over decades in New York City.” The distinctions between the two remain at once intimate and general: “There are photographs that I make with the intention of their remaining photographs, and there are images that I make with the intention of converting them into paintings. It all depends on how I feel about the image and subject. —Christian Viveros-Fauné