Chantal Joffe

Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan
Through July 14

In many aspects, Chantal Joffe’s painting might appear to be close to the disorderly and aggressive spirit of “bad painting,” reminiscent of some of Martin Maloney’s works. Nevertheless, there is an evident and unmistakably instinctive talent, which contains a refined cultural sensibility that refers to some British artists, such as David Hockney and Ronald Kitaj.

The subjects are mostly young girls, teenagers, and women at work, at home, or caught in an intimate moment—the female condition being the fundamental theme. This is investigated by the analysis of behavior and, above all, by the study of a psychological dimension.

In the Milanese show, the artist is showing a series of small canvases painted with fluid and intense expressiveness; in one of them a young girl coming down the stairs has a markedly erotic edge. Also on show are four large paintings some of which have cut-out pictures from books or magazines, which Joffe has stuck onto the canvas, imprinting them with a strong emotional and dreamlike value. Dawlish is a long, thin canvas which shows a lone woman on a deserted beach; the gloomy scene becomes an enigmatic and disturbing landscape of the soul.

Equally desolate, but with a more delicate melancholy, is Moll, a countryside setting in which there appears, from a building in the background, an immobile girl with an anguished face, dressed in ankle-boots and a little pink top. The scene in Night Garden, strikingly surreal, presents a seated young girl with a woman who, standing, looks at us with bewildered eyes; both of the protagonists are immersed in shadow, in the undisputed realm of the great birds of the night. The last large-scale painting is Fight, brought to life by two women with almost caricatured features who dispute for some mysterious reason.

Even if there is an autobiographical dimension discernable in the works, accentuating their psychological tension, their true impact resides in their capacity to embrace the collective unconscious thus becoming metaphors for the human condition.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Amanda Coulson