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Thursday 6 February

Chloé Wise: Hyperreality Turns the Everyday into Art

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Chloé Wise (born in 1990) perfectly embodies the artist who knows how to transform our consumer society into a theater of the absurd while maintaining a remarkably sharp critical distance. This Canadian based in New York deploys a creative arsenal oscillating between oil painting, sculpture, and installation, crafting a universe where laughter mingles with the most acute reflection on our era. Her work, deeply rooted in our time, dissects with surgical precision the mechanisms governing our social relationships and our connection to consumption.

Two striking themes emerge in her work. The first concerns her unique approach to consumerism and its codes, particularly through exploring the link between food and desire. Her bagel- or baguette-shaped bag sculptures, like her famous “Bagel No. 5” (2014), are not mere provocations. They belong to a philosophical tradition dating back to Jean Baudrillard and his theory of simulacra. Baudrillard, in “Simulacra and Simulation” (1981), argued that contemporary society had replaced reality with signs of reality. Wise’s works perfectly illustrate this theory by creating objects that are both simulations of luxury items and representations of food, blurring the lines between edible and commercial, authentic and artificial.

This approach resonates particularly in her more recent installations, such as the series of Caesar salad-shaped chandeliers, where the fake becomes more real than reality, creating what Baudrillard called hyperreality. These sculptures are not simply sophisticated trompe-l’œil; they challenge our relationship with authenticity in a world where the boundary between true and false grows ever more porous. The droplets of dressing that seem to bead on the lettuce leaves of her luminous installations create a fascinating tension between the perishable and the eternal, the utilitarian and the artistic.

The second theme lies in her approach to contemporary portraiture. Wise revisits this traditional genre with particular insight, incorporating the visual codes of the digital age. Her portraits are not mere representations of people but profound explorations of how we stage ourselves in the era of social media. This approach echoes Roland Barthes’ reflections in “Camera Lucida” (1980) on photography and how we construct our image. Barthes spoke of the “punctum”, the element in an image that pierces and touches us personally. In Wise’s work, this punctum often lies in the slightly off-kilter expressions of her subjects, in those smiles that seem both genuine and artificial.

Her depictions of friends and acquaintances, often accessorized with everyday consumer goods, create a fascinating tension between the intimate and the commercial. These portraits are reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch still lifes, where everyday objects carried profound symbolism. But in Wise’s work, the symbols are contemporary: dairy packaging, recognizable brands, and quotidian items elevated to the status of icons. Her painting technique, inherited from the old masters but applied to contemporary subjects, creates a fascinating dialogue between tradition and modernity.

In her latest works, particularly those presented in the exhibition “Torn Clean” (2024), Chloé Wise takes her exploration of human vulnerability and our ways of masking it even further. The introduction of band-aids in her portraits adds a new layer of interpretation: these medical accessories become metaphors for our fragility and our constant need for repair. The manic smiles of her subjects, combined with these discreet band-aids, tell a story of forced resilience, of the social obligation to “keep up appearances” despite our wounds.

Her use of color warrants special attention. The flesh tones she employs, sometimes described as “piglet pink” in her paint tubes, create a tension between the sublime and the abject. This approach recalls Julia Kristeva’s theories on abjection in art, where beauty and repulsion coexist in a complex dance. The monochromatic backgrounds of her recent portraits, often close to her subjects’ skin tones, create a subtle camouflage effect that reinforces the sense of a dissolving identity.

Wise navigates between different registers without ever falling into pure cynicism. Her humor acts as a Trojan horse, allowing deeper questions about our time to emerge. She maintains a delicate balance between social critique and a form of empathy for her subjects, creating art that is neither wholly accusatory nor entirely indulgent.

Her work on smiles, in particular, deserves attention. In a society where the smile has become a form of social currency, Wise turns it into an anthropological study. Her portraits capture the strange temporality of the posed smile, the one that lasts too long to be natural. This exploration echoes Baudrillard’s observations in “America” about the American smile as a codified form of communication. Wise’s subjects seem aware of being observed, their expressions oscillating between authentic and performative.

The artist does not merely criticize this social performance; she also reveals its strange beauty and necessity. Her recent portraits, with their exaggerated smiles and discreet band-aids, tell the story of our collective resilience, our ability to keep smiling even in adversity. Perhaps this is where the greatest strength of her work lies: in its capacity to transform our media-saturated daily lives into a form of contemporary visual poetry.

Her approach to fame and artistic recognition is particularly intriguing. Since the buzz created by her “Bagel No. 5” worn at a Chanel event, Wise has navigated the art world with remarkable intelligence. She uses the very mechanisms she critiques—social media, influencer culture, luxury marketing—to disseminate her work. Her pieces function as both social critique and objects of desire. Her paintings and sculptures, while pointing to the excesses of consumer society, themselves become coveted collectibles. This irony is not lost on the artist, who incorporates it into her reflection on how art circulates and acquires value in our society.

The performative dimension of her work extends beyond canvas and sculpture. Her installations create immersive environments that transform exhibition spaces into stages where the theater of our daily consumption plays out. The blocks of butter slowly melting on their glass pedestals in her recent exhibitions create a temporal tension that forces the viewer to confront the ephemeral nature of our desires and possessions.

Her use of the traditional medium of oil painting to depict our hyperconnected world is no accident. This technique, historically associated with aristocratic portraits and sumptuous still lifes, becomes in her hands a tool for documenting and questioning our new social rituals. The technical virtuosity she deploys serves to represent seemingly banal moments—someone drinking almond milk, a friend posing with wireless earbuds—transforming these everyday scenes into tableaux deserving the same attention as 17th-century vanitas.

The pandemic added a new dimension to her work, particularly in how she addresses indifference as a survival mechanism. In a world saturated with traumatic information, her works explore how we manage to maintain a facade of normalcy. Her portraits from this period capture this strange duality: an acute awareness of catastrophe and the necessity to function normally. The bodies she paints, often nude but never vulgarized, also bear the marks of our time: tattoos, piercings, technological accessories. These elements become temporal markers that anchor her works in our present while giving them potential archaeological value.

She reserves a special treatment for everyday objects. Her contemporary still lifes, populated with common consumer goods, transform these items into relics of our time. A carton of milk becomes a cultural artifact, a band-aid a symbol of our collective vulnerability. This approach recalls the tradition of vanitas, updated for our era of overconsumption and planned obsolescence.

The influence of digital culture on her practice is particularly evident in her image composition. Her framings, often inspired by selfie aesthetics and social media photography, create a dialogue between the tradition of painted portraiture and new forms of self-representation. This hybridization of visual references produces works that function as both sociological documents and autonomous aesthetic objects.

Her work on materiality is particularly fascinating in her sculptures. The use of urethane and oil paint to create hyperrealistic simulations of food raises fundamental questions about our relationship to the real in a society increasingly dominated by the virtual. These works are not merely sophisticated trompe-l’œil; they challenge our ability to distinguish true from false, natural from artificial.

The political dimension of her work, though never didactic, manifests in her approach to questions of gender and identity. Her portraits of women, in particular, deconstruct the codes of female representation in art. The sometimes grotesque or unsettling expressions of her female subjects defy conventions of beauty and docility traditionally associated with women’s portraits.

Wise creates art that speaks profoundly to our time while avoiding the pitfalls of simplistic social commentary. Her work is complex precisely because it refuses easy moral positions. She shows us our world in all its absurdity, beauty, and horror, leaving us free to navigate between these different interpretations.

Chloé Wise’s work offers a complex and nuanced commentary on our time, where the authentic and the artificial constantly intermingle. She captures the essence of our ambivalent relationship with consumption, self-representation, and technology, while creating works that remain deeply human in their approach. Through her critical yet empathetic lens, Wise offers us a mirror of our society, but one that does not simply reflect: it reveals, questions, and transforms our perception of reality.

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