Chloe Wise
Myth Information
Chloe Wise’s paintings are vignettes in a keyhole. Sometimes her bon vivants appear ignorant to what lurks outside—outside their frames, that is—and the burden of their naiveté falls on the viewer, much like it does when we watch characters in a horror movie plan a fun adventure in the woods.
What lurks beyond the horizon of perception? Beyond the tight confines of language, image, time, and space that hold all that is known and knowable? Maybe UFOs—one of Wise’s long-held fascinations. Maybe monsters, ghosts, spirits, gods, angels, demons, death, sex—little deaths—or, most frightening of all, nothing. Like a good horror movie again, Wise doesn’t depict what her subjects see. Instead, she plays with trope and genre, beauty and brushstroke, bringing a retropop grammar to the divine and sublime—hobbyhorse themes of the Renaissance, the Baroque, and, really, art since the caves. It's Spielberg attempting Caravaggio in the Scooby Doo cinematic universe.
— Gideon Jacobs, writer
Foregrounding an interest in the history of portraiture, Wise examines the multiple channels that lead to the construction of a Self, paying particular attention to the interweaving of consumption and image making. With a wry sense of humor, she nods to canonical tableaux, like Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, exploring the shared projected desires built around food and the female body. Meticulously hand painted casts of food serve as the base for the artist’s sculptural practice where strange assemblies, now frozen in sculpted plastic, toy with the presence and absence of unchangeability and perishability, fiction and reality. Advertising, fashion, taboo, multi-national brands—Wise looks to the consumptive habits built around these structures with parody and derision, underlying how the body is framed and becomes excessive in its manipulation of these sites.
