Celeste Rapone — À propos — Slash Paris

If the spaces that appear in Celeste Rapone’s work may initially seem familiar, they belong neither to intimacy nor to refuge. What unfolds within them instead resembles matrices of behavior, in which ordinary gestures disclose their prescriptive charge, evoking social habitus as well as forms of domestication and the assimilation of power. Ornamentation appears on the verge of excess when confronted with the expectations of a society whose every inequality betrays its fragility. Rapone’s painting thus operates as a field of forces in which the body is no longer a figure to be represented, but a zone of friction.

What is at stake here has less to do with narration than with affective compression. Human forms appear under strain, caught within unstable configurations that render visible the regimes of constraint specific to the present. Pictorial space is never neutral. It functions as a normative architecture to which bodies must submit in order to exist. Improbable postures do not signal excess, but enforced adjustment, a way of holding on despite fundamental inadequacy. The surface thereby becomes the site of a discreet conflict between endurance and disintegration, between exposure and withdrawal. Everything proceeds through saturation and successive deformation, through an accumulation of signs that ultimately generates a condition, an atmosphere of lucid fatigue and deferred desire. The construction of figures and scenarios unfolds in reverse, bearing within it the trace of an assumed spontaneity, in which the subject of the painting merges with the motif, because it emerges from it.

The canvas retains the memory of these minute decisions not as confession but as thought in action. The autobiographical dissolves into a broader economy of shared tensions, where individual experience becomes structure and surfaces through tonalities that attest to an absorption, if not an assimilation, of contradiction. What is at stake is not an aesthetic of silence, but an unmasking of the very conditions of visibility.

Born in 1985 in New Jersey, Celeste Rapone graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and completed a master’s degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, where she also taught through 2023. She lives and works in Chicago. A recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2018 and a nominee for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 2024, she will present her first solo exhibition with Esther Schipper in Berlin, that represents her, during Gallery Weekend Berlin in spring 2026. Her work is held in major international institutional collections including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, the M Woods Museum in Beijing, the START Museum in Shanghai, and the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art in Rizhao.

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