ARTIST STATEMENT
There is a whole generation of young adults who have spent a majority of their adult years navigating a world during and post-pandemic that doesn’t make sense and is filled with injustices and insecurity. In an increasingly entropic world, Chantal Danyluk brings light to some of these issues by using whimsical imagery such as plants, animals, and food to bring a sense of understanding in a world filled to the brim with unprocessed bad news from the media. Her surrealistic paintings are often exist cut out from their surroundings, forced to join our own, or placed in unlikely situations. The humanoid figures fry, combust, and drown under the weighty pressure of social issues like cost of living, climate change, rent prices, and female objectification. These surreal figures are faced with unimaginable situations that mirror the unprecedented situations in our own world. Cheeky, almost comical, her pieces both validate feelings and mock social standards. In this way, Chantal creates physical manifestations of a generation’s uncertain feelings. While our generation is faced with new existential dread at the concoction of real-world events outside our control, Chantal’s work uses unexpected imagery to help us cope with it.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Chantal Danyluk is a portrait and figure painter based out of Chicago, IL. She received a BA Studio Art with a focus in painting from Hendrix College in 2019, where she focused primarily on painting the figure. In the past, she has explored portraiture as a method to capture people’s unique personalities and individual emotions. Her current oil paintings explore human emotion and interaction with the world around them more broadly, and combine animal and plant life to create quirky, comical, forms. Her work explores themes of feminism and the modern-day psyche in response to a world she believes is becoming more and more surreal.
© Chantal Danyluk