It's been quite a while since the last time we've featured the work by Aleah Chapin who was one of the artists that participated in ME: An Exhibition of Contemporary Self-Portraiture which we co-curated with Sugarlift in NYC almost two years ago. Continuously mindblown with her hyperrealistic renditions of mostly female figures, we really enjoyed seeing the recent change in her work which she is currently introducing with a solo show Walking Backwards at Flowers Gallery in Hong Kong.
Over the years we've seen many artists reaching the level where realism or hyperrealism somehow doesn't provide enough challenge and leaves very little room for conveying emotions. And while such a technique does present the immense power of oil as a medium, it sort of removes the possibility for expressing or capturing the internal ambiance in which the work has been created. And however intense this realization might be, it's incredibly hard to make a shift from such a position which was achieved by years and years of dedicated work and meticulous perfection of technique. Now, we're not sure if this was exactly how the new works by Chapin came to be, but the automatic, intuitive drawings on paper that she was making with her non-dominant hand at the beginning of the pandemic eventually found their way into her new body of paintings she started developing.
Instead of continuing to train her eyes and hands to work together to perceive and express the physical reality, Chapin started constructing works whose reality is below the external surface. Her traditional focus outward, towards other people, was suddenly redirected towards herself due to the Covid lockdowns and the general atmosphere. This triggered a new environment in which she resorted to using her body as well as emotive state as a fresh reference. Taking the intuitive drawings made at such a peculiar moment in time as a guideline, her inner body ended up guiding the outer body as she created more comprehensive portraiture of herself. The leaves, hay, pebbles, and other organic material on which these abstracted nude figures are placed, as well as the consistent and highly atmospheric color settings they are swaddled in, additionally accentuated the rawness of the human condition she's capturing. By blending the gestured, naive, but highly evocative elements with the meticulous renditions of body parts, skin surfaces, and surrounding elements, Chapin painted suggestive visual mazes for which she had to metaphorically start walking backward in order to move forward. —Sasha Bogojev
