Chloe Wise, La nouvelle ère
Chloe Wise presents her third solo exhibition at the Almine Rech Gallery, New York and recently participated in Un hiver à Paris, an exhibition at her Paris branch. Discover this artist whose success on social networks should not obscure the questions her works ask.
Chloe Wise (born in 1990 in Montreal) has developed a figurative painting, a work of sculpture and videos imprinted of irony and a certain melancholy which seize, divert or lean against the codes of fashion. Symbol of success, tireless worker in the service of her creation and symptom of an era of networked communication, the artist, while her artwork is still young, tells us about many tragedies that seem to be repeated.
Cultivating a notoriety acquired precisely on the benches of the fashion “défilés”, where her sculptures, associated with the leather goods of major brands have excited many observers, Chloe Wise entangles flattering varnishes, shimmering colors and organic shapes in creations with an assumed kitsch hint. From figuration with strong contrasts and sharpened naivety of his painting to petrified dishes and other sandwiches in decorative accessories to be moved by the body of those who wear them, through the altar installations erected to the glory of dinner ; her works draw a universe full of its own ambiguity which vibrates on the borders of intimacy and exhibition through the serious and intensive practice of a reproduction, fantasized or real, of mundane (edible) objects.
With the same nonchalance, she seizes monuments of art history to integrate them into her images of a world of pleasure and opulence. A constant junction that refers to her way of creating a dialogue between inside and outside. Between the reflection of our own image, the exterior reading of innocuous scenes of banter between well-dressed young people and the obsessive staging of food, a filling tool for interior purposes. Cult of objects, cult of image and cult of portrait are fundamental here, as the icons of modern art with, for example, the influence of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe which resonates in many of her works. Chloe Wise alternates influences and mingles cultural worlds in works that invariably pay homage to them.
A balanced articulation that is also found between criticism of the object, consumption as well as ephemeral notoriety and its ability to use it as a support to graft its own vision of beauty.
Playing in her paintings with everyday items, thus featuring alongside bodies food packaging, clothing brands and, as always in her work, an almost sanitary variety of fruits and vegetables, Chloe Wise multiplies the symbols, sliding head-on from Pop Art to a surrealist lineage, where strangeness aims to make the total reality of a world open to our senses.
These appetizing and seductive hints inevitably hide with her a certain transformation, a filter that would necessarily have altered the essence of any object of desire. Between two worlds, between the shadowless smiles of her young and trendy characters, the endlessly repeated laughter and pouts of her ripoliné models, Chloe Wise’s constructions resonate with the challenges of social representation that are contemporary to them. The artist thus asserts her posture of “festive” criticism of a fashion industry. She actually reveals, knowingly or not, in the brilliance that made her notoriety and in her collaborations that followed (as for example with the brand Jacquemus) one of her secrets to operate on such a large scale ; its capacity to produce, beyond the object, the desirable image of its possession. To succeed in this tour de force of making its “exhibition” the real object of consumption and in doing so result in a circular and self-sustained economic system of desire.
Whether she assumes it or leaves room for doubt, Chloe Wise thus touches, stigmata as exciting that they can be annoying of a creation entirely melted in her own ability to communicate, making her own person the very accessory of creations alongside its mere presence justifies the immortalization by a fashion magazine photographer. Her large monographic exhibition in 2019 at the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark seems to carry this ambition with many iterations of the mirror in his compositions, an alternative to the gaze that could finally, if we believe the promise of its title, And Everything Was True, reveal the truth.
A truth she never hid; if, from the mass consumption product to the most expensive luxury, the staging can always exercise the magnetism of seduction, venture to sink its teeth into it, to let itself be lulled by the mirage of its accessibility, there is a strong risk of waking the tragic end of the illusion. As it was in another mythology.
