KEEP ON SMILING
Brussels, April 2024
Internationally renowned for her paintings, videos and installations, CHLOE WISE is now presenting her very first solo show in Brussels. Inside the Almine Rech gallery, the Canadian-born, New York-based artist exhibits one of her arresting new series, Torn Clean.
On each white wall, large-scale paintings surround us, depicting nude women looking straight into our eyes with a smile that's as delightful as it’s frightening. At the far end of the space, an installation of giant band-aids is suspended on a blue background, as if to immerse us in the little blue boxes that contain those pieces of "fake skin". Through these striking pictorial elements, Wise once again demonstrates her mastery of portraiture and her ability to pose questions by focusing on such ordinary elements. With a simple, if disconcerting, smile, the artist invites us to ask what lies beneath appearances, behind the face expression we all put on in uncomfortable situations, behind the flesh-colored surfaces that try to mask wounds. We keep on smiling, to cover what?
Nice to meet you, Chloe! Is it your first in Brussels?
Yes, it is! I feel warmly welcomed. It's been very pleasant to set up everything for the show.
Great to hear! I just had a walk through the exhibition. The first thing that caught my eye is the flesh colour shade that is very present. How did you start this series, and why did you decide to focus on this colour palette?
It started with the first painting of the series, the one you can see in the last room of the gallery, which is also the title image. I made that one about a year and a half ago. I mixed up a beautiful skin tone to paint this woman, and for whatever reason, I decided to use it for the background as well. When I looked back at the painting, I felt something because of the look in her eyes and the way she was smiling at me. I refused to exhibit it, I wanted to live with it for a while because something about it was so unsettling. It was the fleshiness, the colour, the perturbing sort of uncanniness, and a bit of the grotesque in the bloodiness of her gums. I felt like there was a secret that she had access to, and I didn't know what [it was]. I wanted to follow what that painting was telling me to. So, I started to make more works that were compatible with this one, trying to create a similar sentiment. Then, it occurred to me that this first character felt like an anthropomorphised bandaid. She appeared like a human bandaid because she was basically saying something like, “Nothing to see here, folks.”
Indeed, this is the feeling that this painting can send back to us as if it were conscious of being looked at.
I think a lot of the work I make is aware of itself as being perceived. So yes, the paintings know you're looking at them and they're looking back at you. They're kind of taunting you and maybe facetiously smiling back at you. It’s pretty different from what has been painted in art history in a voyeuristic way. We used to look at the reclining nude who's looking away, whose gaze we don't meet. Historically, there was something about that forced intimacy. So, what better way to explore and question that than to look at a sort of artificial intimacy of skin colour?
The fact that you produce a painting and then let yourself be guided by the emotions it's generating is very interesting. Is it the way you usually process all your series?
It depends. I can be working on more than one painting and may believe I'm starting a series, and then I get led astray completely. Sometimes, I don't think I'm working on a series and then I realize that those are all one body of work. It's a sort of two steps forward, one step sideways, one step backwards. I live with my work, so it's not so strategic. But this time it was particular because I kept on coming back to that one painting and I wanted to invite the rest of her friends over. I wanted to make more paintings that made me feel that uncomfortable. The discomfort I felt from looking at it was different every day. And I loved that! Because something you can’t figure out can lead you to complex emotions that pure beauty can’t necessarily make you feel.
What emotions did you want to raise to the viewer?
During the opening night, it was interesting to see that most people had a complex combination of emotions like discomfort and anxiety, going with the fact of being looked at. Some men said there was something sexy or sensual, and some women were like, “No, dude.” [Laugh] Some other women told me that they know how those pink people in the paintings feel because those faces express recognizable feelings in the end – smiling through pain or grinning through tears. I'm portraying a combination of emotions, from ecstatic joy to pain. In biblical painting, there is this same combination of expressing both agony and ecstasy. The extreme parts often create the same facial expression. There are interesting comparisons to be made between the face of someone exhibiting ecstasy or agony, wincing or smiling, tears of joy or tears of sadness. I want to play with that ambiguity, and I think that these paintings intend to keep it ambiguous.
The feeling of ambiguity is also palpable because we don’t really know where the scenes are happening. Sometimes there are textures and details, but no clear spaces. For you, what is happening in these paintings?
These women could be on stage, but it could also be a portrait of a secret society, a ritual, a ceremony, or an orgy. The context is very unclear, there isn’t one specifically. I’m interested in the narrative that people would then project onto it. In the last room, there is this installation of giant suspended bandaids. The bandaid implies the wound. Behind a bandaid, you can only imagine what the wound is about, whether it's a bite mark or a cut. The objects tell us a story that we then piece together. But in the end, we can only imagine what the story is. I think the background of the paintings tells a story of artifice. It's certainly not realism. It's like these women are in this kind of ether, just like the bandaids are floating in the blue ether of the bandaid box. They're just platonic images of archetypal women. Are we the audience looking on a stage with all these women, or are we on the stage and they're watching us? Are we part of them? Do we feel connected with them? Or is it a dream? I don't know. But I like the idea that these women are certainly not passive. The discomfort probably comes from that too.
What remains behind all these smiles? What are they telling us?
It’s funny because I actually felt like one of my paintings during the opening. I was standing in the middle of the room when a group of people came and said, “Tell us about the show.” I don’t mind talking in public, but there, I was like, “Oh God, now I'm on a stage too.” I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks. [Laughs] I was talking and nobody was nodding or responding. I just had this sort of dissociation where I could see myself from the top. I felt so stressed. Then people started to communicate with me and we had really great philosophical conversations. That moment when you're forced to perform can happen to anybody in any field of work. It's like any moment where you get embarrassed in public, but you have to keep on performing to keep things together. It becomes a face situation where you have to keep on smiling despite all the emotions you can feel. The show must go on.
You know, I was making this body of work while there's so many crazy things going on in the world. A part of this work also deals with the impossibility of actually dealing with things like environmental catastrophes, wars, and all the personal issues. Whatever you’re going through, you still have to do your pretty little artwork or your silly little tasks. Under capitalism, you can't really just stop. I’m already so lucky to make art with all of that. It's the ultimate freedom of expression. But even so, what can you really say that would actually touch on the vastness of human emotions and experiences? It's not my job to do that, but in a way, I'm painting these smiles that imply the impossibility of actually even addressing some of the issues in the room. The paintings themselves are under the shadow of some unseen impending doom. Because that's how we are in a room right now, you and I talking, smiling and nodding, and around us there's a very nice gallery, in a very nice town. And then right outside of that, there are refugee issues, strife and struggles. The terror and traumas outside are unimaginably large. I guess I didn't go into this body of work to specifically talk about big issues, but focusing on such a small thing as a smile opens to the unseen elsewhere.
It's fascinating how a simple smile can refer to so many things. Why did you only portray women here?
Honestly, I don't know. I don't only paint women usually, but it just felt right for this. I think it's women who go through the performance. There's a necessity to perform that is taught to women, like, “Be a nice girl, smile, smile more.” I didn't necessarily intend for this to be feminist, but somehow it refers to that anyway.
What do you put bandaids on?
Well, I have 12 bandaids on each foot right now. [Laugh] I put them on preventatively before I came to the opening because I wore these amazing boots that I knew were gonna make me bleed. So in a way, I thought it was very ironic to put on a thousand bandaids before I go to my own show about bandaids. [Laugh] Bandaids are both preventative and protective. There is the English expression: “Putting a bandaid on a bullet wound.” It's like putting a napkin on the ocean and trying to wipe it up. It's so not enough. They’re palliative solutions, but we still need them. Just because you can't fix something doesn't mean you shouldn't try. So for me, smiling is a bandaid socially. When something is super awkward or about to break into violent tension or chaos, laughing it off is a human instinct. Smiling is a protection to dissolve the brewing tension and to protect, to create empathy. There’s a beautiful quote that I always come back to: “Smile the American smile,” smile to show them how indifferent you are to others, smile and they will smile back, smile because you have nothing to say. It’s like this empty gesture that means something positive, but the real meaning is, “Don't kill me, let's not fight.” Even if bandaids don’t solve the problem, we do need them, so they become fake skin, another layer we have to protect our poor mortal body. We put bandaids on an open wound or a broken heart just like we put a smile on, to cope.
The exhibition ‘Torn Clean’ by Chloe Wise is currently on view at Almine Rech gallery in Brussels, until May 25th, 2024
Interview and portraits by Hanna Pallot
All artworks © Chloe Wise, courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Artworks pictures Hugard & Vanoverschelde Photography