Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Celeste Rapone paints like one plays chess, with the difference that her failed moves become formal victories. Born in 1985 in New Jersey and based in Chicago, this artist has been building a body of work for fifteen years that questions the contemporary female condition through saturated compositions where bodies twist, objects proliferate, and pictorial space stubbornly refuses to breathe.
The recent exhibition “Big Chess” at Corbett vs. Dempsey in 2024 crystallizes her approach: eleven canvases divided between “performers” and “spectators,” where women overperform in theatrical settings while others, reduced to portrait scale, display resignation and regret. This dichotomy is not new for Rapone, but it reaches a particular acuity here. The figures play giant chess in a park, hike, and fish for sharks from a canoe. These are everyday activities transformed into existential trials by the way the artist compresses space and distorts anatomies.
The reference to the Dutch Golden Age runs through Rapone’s work as a productive obsession. The artist herself states her interest in “this basic starting idea” typical of 17th-century Dutch painting [1]. But unlike Vermeer, who bathed his domestic interiors in meditative light, Rapone floods her compositions with a profusion of contemporary objects that generate anxiety rather than calm. In Nightshade (2022), a woman examines a scene through a frame formed by her fingers. This mise en abyme recalls the visual devices used by 17th-century Dutch painters, windows framing exterior scenes in Vermeer, mirrors revealing hidden spaces in Van Eyck, but tinged with a biting irony absent from the original works.
Flemish still lifes celebrated commercial abundance and earthly vanity through the controlled accumulation of precious objects. Rapone takes up this vocabulary but reverses it: her accumulations, Ricola wrappers, silica gel packets, Cherry 7UP cans, and Yellow Tail Shiraz bottles, become the vanities of the 21st century, no longer testifying to wealth but to compulsive consumerism and an overloaded domestic life. This transformation of the Dutch pictorial genre into sociological critique occurs without didacticism. The specific objects Rapone includes, a Klean Kanteen water bottle, reproductions of Caravaggio on a jacket, and David Burry “Shoe” chairs popularized on TikTok, function as temporal and cultural markers, firmly rooting these compositions in our contemporaneity while maintaining dialogue with pictorial tradition.
Light constitutes another point of contact with the Dutch heritage, although radically reinterpreted. Whereas Vermeer orchestrated his natural lighting to create meditative spaces, Rapone constructs artificial and theatrical lighting scenographies. Her nocturnal interiors, as in “Blue Basement” (2023) where three figures play poker perched on chair-shoes while water floods the cellar, generate an oppressive atmosphere. The rising water, a disturbing narrative detail, recalls the concerns of Dutch painters for their precarious geography, but here transformed into a metaphor of an ignored domestic catastrophe.
Spatiality perhaps constitutes the most significant difference between Rapone and her Dutch predecessors. The interiors of Pieter de Hooch organized perspective and depth according to reassuring geometry. Rapone, on the other hand, systematically crushes depth, pushing figures and objects to the foreground in a compression that generates discomfort and claustrophobia. This assumed flatness, inherited more from Cubism and Modernism than from the 17th century, transforms the way the domestic scene is viewed: we are no longer invited to contemplate a harmonious space but confronted with a dizzying accumulation of elements threatening to overflow the frame.
Beyond the historical references, Rapone’s work constitutes a sociological study of the contemporary female body caught in the contradictory injunctions of our time. Her figures adopt anatomically impossible postures, limbs stretched, bodies compressed, joints twisted beyond plausibility. This systematic distortion is neither gratuitous nor purely formal: it visually materializes the pressure exerted on women to simultaneously occupy all roles: ambitious professional, desirable partner, potential mother, and accomplished artist.
“Muscle for Hire” (2022) offers a striking illustration of this theme. A woman in a pink velvet tracksuit digs a black hole towards nothingness in the middle of a football field, a pigeon perched on her dirty heel. Around her accumulate suburban maternity debris: parking ticket, water bottle, Ricola lozenges, silica gel packet. The work was painted as Rapone, approaching her forties, questioned her own relationship with motherhood. This autobiographical dimension runs through all her production without ever descending into direct confession. The figures remain generic enough to function as avatars of a condition shared by an entire generation of educated, ambitious women faced with the vertigo of unmade choices.
The “House Sounds” series (2023) develops this sociology of contemporary female daily life. In “Drawing Corner,” a woman simultaneously tries to exercise with a resistance band and draw a baroque still life: luminous skull, purple asparagus, snake skin boot, and parmesan arranged on an ironing board. This absurd attempt at multitasking illustrates the injunction made to women to accomplish everything simultaneously, transforming even the domestic space into a theater of permanent performance. An empty official envelope lies on the floor, perhaps suggesting the economic urgency driving this creative frenzy.
Humor is, for Rapone, a strategy of resistance against these pressures. “Trymaker” (2023) shows a woman slumped on a lounge chair behind a wire fence, wearing a pink bucket hat and faded white lingerie, while a robotic lawn mower takes care of the tiny garden. The suspended ball game that seems to fly towards the viewer materializes both the longing for escape and the impossibility of freedom: tied by its cord, it will inevitably fall back down. This image of domestic confinement presented as emancipation sums up the sociological critique carried by the work.
The specific objects that Rapone meticulously includes in her compositions function as ethnographic data. Necklaces, tattoos, Chanel decals, tote bags, Brazilian waxes, lace bras: these elements document the bodily and consumer practices of a particular social class and generation. Coming from an Italian-American Catholic family in New Jersey, Rapone draws on her own past to build a visual vocabulary that far exceeds personal anecdote. The sneakers she desired as a teenager but her parents refused to buy, the glowing necklaces people cracked to make shine at high school parties, these details become symptoms of a middle-class culture aspiring to status while remaining trapped in kitsch.
The generational dimension appears clearly in the exhibition “Nightshade” (2022). The funereal tones, selfies taken on the New Jersey Transit with a phone adorned with a reproduction of Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” garlic sliced with a razor at three fourteen in the morning: these scenes evoke an ambivalent nostalgia for a past youth mixed with the anxiety of an unsatisfactory present. Rapone explicitly questions what would have happened if her artistic career had failed, if she had stayed in her native suburb, occasionally visiting New York museums but deprived of the professional fulfillment she ultimately achieved.
This sociological exploration does not spare the painting practice itself. Rapone paints alla prima, without preparatory sketching, intuitively building her compositions layer by layer. She explicitly compares her method to chess: “What interested me in the comparison with chess is how in painting one makes a series of choices without being sure how they will unfold or respond to each other. You continue and try to approach from different angles until something opens up. And often you lose. But then you can try again and again and again” [2]. This statement perfectly summarizes the intersection between formal and existential concerns in her work: pictorial failure becomes a metaphor for life failure, and vice versa.
Celeste Rapone’s work sits at the uncomfortable intersection between pictorial legacies and contemporary urgencies, between technical virtuosity and constant doubt, between humor and despair. Her decision to force the whole body into the frame, refusing flattering cropping, constitutes a gesture as much political as aesthetic: fully exposing these women in their vulnerability, awkwardness, and impossible postures.
The artist confided to her husband that she knows a painting is progressing well when the work in progress makes her laugh [3]. This admission reveals the liberating function of humor in her practice. Faced with contradictory injunctions, widespread anxiety, overwhelming expectations, laughter becomes an act of resistance. Rapone’s figures spectacularly fail to hold a posture, accomplish a task, or embody an ideal, but this very failure frees them from the tyrannies of perfection.
This celebration of imperfection continues the work of artists like Paula Rego or Nicole Eisenman, who refuse to beautify the female condition in order to expose its contradictions bluntly. But Rapone adds her own voice, marked by her Italian-American suburban origin, rigorous academic training, and above all this ability to transform discomfort into pictorial strength.
When she depicts a woman stretching a canvas in “Swan” (2019), an ironic title evoking the absent grace of this laborious gesture, Rapone perhaps accomplishes her most revealing act: showing painting as physical work, an ungrateful effort, a struggle against the material and against oneself. The painting becomes canvas back, revealing its internal structure, refusing illusion to display its construction. This formal honesty reflects the emotional honesty that runs throughout the work.
Rapone offers no resolution, no easy comfort. Her figures remain trapped in their compressed spaces, crushed by their possessions and twisted by their ambitions. But in this uncompromising portrayal of the difficulty of being a woman today, in this refusal of conventional pictorial seduction, in this assumed accumulation of embarrassing details, a form of dignity paradoxically emerges. These women fail, certainly, but they try. Again and again. Like the artist before her canvas, they continue, enter from different angles, hoping that eventually something will open up.
- Art Verge, “Playful Interplay of Volumes and Colours Command Celeste Rapone’s Paintings”, Yannis Kostarias, March 8, 2019
- Meer Art, “Big Chess”, November 25, 2024
- Femme Art Review, “The Figure Does Not Win Every Time: In Discussion with Celeste Rapone”, Elaine Tam, July 30, 2020
