Nicole Chaput

Cagona (2020)
oil on canvas
34 x 28 in.
NFS

Flipping from monogrammed handbags to mutilated bodies: a stare down between luxury and blood, my paintings are a braid of confrontations between conflicting emotional hierarchies.

In personal and painterly orders, self-destruction can lead to becoming. I roll my eyeballs inward as a medium to explore rejection and seduction as they operate simultaneously. The lines where something ends and where everything else begins are erased to create hologram that shivers between elegance and nausea. A kiss enveloped in mud: colors that cannot be named, a glitter in sickness, a narrative as a lace stocking that keeps unraveling into holes.

Painting is no longer a pictorial ground: it is a surrogate organism where images that poke out of their own skin are conjured. These images are fillets from a once whole body.

The anatomy exists only in its assumption; fastened by the wink of its adornment.

I paint because I want to be surprised by what paint-a wobbly, buttery paste of matter-can do, and to observe my own temperament as we push each other.

Painting is fossil of a fight, a map of my hand as I touch a surface that whispers and scoffs. A slice from my own body in a limbo of intimacy where wings flutter until I and the eye can be pinned down.

© Nicole Chaput