Within John’s maximalist compositions and installations of 2D works and sculptures lives a cosmology of effects, sexual desires and affirmations, autobiography, and cultural ethnography. Or, more bluntly, his work is a portal into a visual universe all its own, where intuition, imagination, and audacity beget sparse and densely rendered compositions of lovers, avatars, fantastical landscapes, and brawny mermen. Culling from memories, personal experiences, politics, and engagements within subcultural communities, John’s drawings and paintings are imbued with an idiosyncratic lore. They are chromatic amalgamations of gestural brushstrokes, garish-yet-earnest figurative portraits of self, husband, adult film stars, friends, and invented Dungeons and Dragons characters.
Throughout his practice, John is negotiating space- two-dimensionally within the picture plane, three-dimensionally within nature and built environments, and thematically via cultural and contextual references within the work. The results are playful topographies that showcase variance in figure-ground relationships. John utilizes an exuberant and emancipated approach to color, brushwork, and building compositions. Many drawings and paintings depict shallow grounds and give an impression of immediacy and urgency. This is not unlike the ways of the Surrealists, Dadaists, Chicago Imagists, and Neo-Abstract Expressionists, all of whom worked with an acute speed and seriality. Rituals in thought and action are emblematic within and throughout this work.
In Only Fins, the viewer is transported to a fictional bar of the same name, where “fishermen take their love for marine life into a new dimension” (John DeLeon Martin, Pool Rules, 2025). Upon entering the gallery installation, we are submerged in darkness, the only light sources being the artworks themselves, rendered in Glow-in-the-dark paint. At Only Fins, we enter a world of merfolk, fishy femmes, wading cubs (of the queer male variety), and star-crossed, land-and-sea lovers. In the center of the room, a painted wooden structure, made in two parts, doubles as a ground for a rendering of a breasted-and-finned fish figure and an aquatic reliquary. Painted toy figurines and a mounted print of a sexy androgynous merman and their hippo friend (or pimp/lover?) live within this shrine, reminiscent of a dollhouse. The bottom half of the sculpture doubles as a stage, specifically a platform box to dance atop, most likely used by Ryder “Raw” Bereld, John’s Dungeons and Dragons campaign character. Rydem is a “rent man, gogo boy, drag queen, and nude musician” at Only Fins (Martin, Pool Rules, 2025).
Through sensory deprivation, John plays with the contradictions inherent to marginal visibility and the collective ambivalence and ignorance of what it means to occupy a marginal identity. We are also taken to the darkness- of the sea, the subconscious, the bar, the anus- to the pits and crevices that see little light but that contain glimmers of hope, albeit hued with a bearable uncertainty, a chance to be sensational and insatiable altogether. Kink, queer, and poly-cultural worlds collide to reject a traditionalism of form and content. A personal and communal erotic is conveyed boundlessly through John’s practice; this boundlessness is akin to a saga, a multi-day edging session, to living.