James Leary
The Knows Nose
Opening Reception:
Thursday, May 8th, 2025
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Chelsea Walls
231 10th Ave, New York, NY 10011
Chelsea Walls is pleased to present
The Knows Nose, a solo exhibition by James Leary. The 56 paintings (50 oil paintings and 6 watercolors) in The Knows Nose bring together
the ongoing picture problems Leary has explored in his previous work - the depiction of
space, the corporeal origins of humor, metaphor as character, surrealism - with themes
encountered in his clinical work as a psychotherapist - the joys and terrors of the body,
relational experience, the fungibility of appetite, psychopathology, intrapsychic conflict.
The homunculus - a distorted representation of the body illustrating the brain’s
allocation of sensory and motor areas - appears throughout, betraying drives and
mental states through bulging eyes, desiccated or engorged lips, and tumescent noses.
Here, it embodies a figure estranged from itself, unmoored from proprioception -
alienated from both self and environment. The hand has never met the other hand that
lives in a far land. The torso remains a partially explored territory. The face becomes a
landscape, a terrain across which figures dance and headlights sweep. The car
materializes as a metaphor for plodding inquiry and passing insight, an avatar for
emergent agency and awareness. Likewise, each body part embodies shifting states of
being. There is the thinks nose, the believes nose, the feels nose - and the knows nose,
invoking the body’s capacity to know itself at the point where it meets the world,
humorously dramatizing self-knowledge as a tragicomic bodily phenomenon.
In the doubling of faces and the layering of body upon body, dynamics of relational
experience, internalized object relations, and transference are represented as spatial
and proximal arrangements. A series of watercolors - exploring the relationships
between father, mother, and brother - render a family romance of annoyance,
embarrassment, burden, affinity, and love. This grammar of familiarity and difference
stands as the show’s broader conceit, a morphology of shuffling caricature, chiaroscuro
and jarring shifts of scale which explore the experience of transformation, relatedness,
and interiority.