Flowers Projects

September 28 – October 28, 2023
Opening Reception: September 28, 6-8pm

By Jacob Hicks

Aleah Chapin is a painter whose technical prowess is unchallenged. She is described by Eric Fischl as “the best…painter of flesh alive today.” In 2012 she won the prestigious BP Portrait Award. She has the unique capacity to present resoundingly realistic descriptions of human form in paint and overlay that visual articulation in a psychic skin of empathetic and emotional feather down.

Chapin’s latest body of work soars to new heights, not an easy feet considering the strength of her oeuvre. Marrying the languages of color field abstraction and baroque figuration, it is a response to our times, to the spiritual emptiness of late capitalism in America, to Roe v. Wade’s overturning, and to the systematic degradation and dehumanization of women. It is a response to the pandemic and the internal collapse of our republic, to unmasked and proud fascism, to the unhesitant white oppression of non-white culture, and to the speculation and valuation of that oppression through performative support. It is a response to the commodification of an artist’s “type” of work in an industry which dissuades the evolution of personal vision in favor of recognizable, reproducible, and marketable “product.”

Like the artist William Blake, who also had a strict formal training and an immense technical prowess, Chapin’s paintings profess the impenetrable glory of humanism in an appeal to look inward. Blake, educated at the Royal Academy of Art, left the Academy’s artistic strictures in the dust of his true sight, generally a hard row to hoe. Real vision is seldom recognized in its day. His Royal Academy contemporary Henry Fuseli, who Blake considered a mentor, worked to keep the 16-year junior, hallucinatory, Swedenborgian, and genius pupil in the loop of traditional academia. Fuseli tried to sustain Blake through patronage and commission opportunities. Despite it, Blake was shunned as a fringe personality and a failed artist. As we know, his eventual canonical importance was enfolded in history over the course of the next 200 years.

like painter Georgia O’Keefe, Chapin stepped away from NYC in the face of rapid and mounting success. She moved to the west coast to immerse herself in nature and her origins. The desire for metamorphosis outweighed the weight of expectation. It is not an easy path to choose vision over establishment. It is a long and arduous journey, often without fruit in the here and now. Chapin deserves the fruit of her labors. She needs to be commended for fearlessly jumping off into the deep end and swimming freely. This body of work is guided by sensitivity, instinct, and spirit. The paintings flutter between archetypal space and the space of the physical body, the depiction of which she has perfected. “The Space Between Us” produces a visual material which feeds meaning, purpose, and insight and sings with bold assuredness.