FERNBERGER

Gary Cannone’s recent acrylic paintings on wood panel possess a distinctly human scale: small enough to rest in the artist’s lap, where they are typically painted. They depict built environments—architectural structures, interiors, ramps, and furniture—organized according to a spatial logic that is at once familiar and impossible. Recalling the recursive architecture of M.C. Escher, Cannone’s compositions resist resolution: stairways, planes, and passages appear coherent at first glance, only to undermine themselves upon sustained looking.

Cannone has cited Gertrude Abercrombie and Giorgio de Chirico as important influences, artists associated with Surrealism and Metaphysical painting whose work similarly begins with the recognizable world before allowing it to slip into something stranger and more psychologically charged. Cannone’s spaces operate through a related estrangement. Everyday architecture remains legible, yet the ordinary expectations we bring to it—where a staircase leads, how a room is entered, whether a piece of furniture can be used—are repeatedly frustrated.

This instability also has an embodied dimension. Cannone, who uses a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis, paints with the panels resting in his lap, a working method shaped in part by the practical conditions of his body. His acute attention to the promises and failures of architecture likewise emerges from lived experience. An apparently impossible ramp that leads nowhere, for instance, is drawn from an actual architectural encounter. Within the painting, however, it becomes more than an observed absurdity: it points to the often invisible assumptions embedded within the built environment about whose bodies will move through it, and how.

Cannone’s paintings make those assumptions newly perceptible. Stairs need not lead somewhere; ramps may fail to provide access; chairs may cease to function as chairs. In his synthetic worlds, the most mundane structures of daily life can no longer be taken for granted. What initially appears to be an exercise in optical impossibility thus becomes a more fundamental destabilization of the ordinary—a world in which architecture remains recognizable even as its presumed logic, utility, and reliability begin to give way.

Gary Cannone (b. 1964, Chicago) lives and works in Los Angeles. Cannone has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions and projects including Pickle, Malvoyante, Los Angeles (2026); Go Hang a Salami, I’m a Lasagna Hog, Malvoyante, Los Angeles (2024); Manet/Degas, Compound Yellow, Chicago (2024); and In Response to Norman Pritchard, Broodthaers Society of America, New York (2024).His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Hammer, Los Angeles; LAX Art, Los Angeles; the Power Station, Dallas. He received his BFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1987 BFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his MFA from the University of Chicago in 1991.

Gary Cannone (b. 1964, Chicago) lives and works in Los Angeles. Cannone has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions and projects including Pickle, Malvoyante, Los Angeles (2026); Go Hang a Salami, I’m a Lasagna Hog, Malvoyante, Los Angeles (2024); Manet/Degas, Compound Yellow, Chicago (2024); and In Response to Norman Pritchard, Broodthaers Society of America, New York (2024).His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Hammer, Los Angeles; LAX Art, Los Angeles; the Power Station, Dallas. He received his BFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1987 BFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his MFA from the University of Chicago in 1991.