For a work of art to be pop, it often helps if it’s figurative. Gerald Lovell’s Fountainhead residency was spent working on an upcoming solo show with PPOW. “I’ve been doing a lot of Instagram-esque pictures,” Lovell says. “Pictures of my friends on vacation. There’s one painting of my friends in front of the Eiffel Tower.” The paintings, modeled on photos that Lovell takes with his phone, are realistic but with touches of gestural marks, especially on the figures’ skin. By painting Black people without an overt political message, Lovell is probing the limits of Black art today– how it’s made, and perceived. 

“There’s a lot of context that goes into the Black figure,” Lovell says. “I one hundred percent get the history of why.” He wants to know when Black artists can simply document their lives, and enter the art canon simply for making great work, rather than communicating a specific politics. “I’m just asking the question: when does the artist or the curator get to have that level of control?” he says. Born in Chicago to Puerto Rican and Black parents, Lovell sees his paintings as a personal photo album, a way to preserve memories and transmit knowledge into the future. 

“I always think of the work in the context of years and years after I’m no longer alive,” Lovell says. Cell phones, contemporary clothing styles, people in the midst of hanging out—Lovell’s paintings capture not only a visual record of people now, but also how we understand ourselves as subjects of ubiquitous photography. In other words, candids are increasingly rare: “The phone did a psychological number on us,” Lovell says. “Everyone’s kind of a model now. Everyone poses.”

  One of the works for his show at PPOW is a diptych of him and his friend playing basketball. “I have an annual basketball dream where I play in a league for a day,” Lovell says. He’s played with Lebron James, Derrick Rose, and Kobe Bryant. If it gets sold, the diptych cannot be split into two; they must remain together. “The paintings themselves are starting to have friends.”