Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Christina Quarles (born in 1985) paints as if Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon had a child raised by Adobe Illustrator algorithms, nourished by David Hockney’s acid colors and cradled by Audre Lorde’s poetry. In her Altadena, California studio, this artist orchestrates a pictorial revolution that shatters our certainties about body and identity. Her monumental canvases plunge us into a universe where ambiguity reigns supreme, where flesh metamorphoses and identities dissolve only to reinvent themselves.
Quarles’s work revolves around two major axes that intertwine like the bodies she paints: on one hand, a radical exploration of what I will call “the aesthetics of bodily excess”, and on the other hand, a bold reinvention of identity representation through pictorial fragmentation. These two dimensions enrich each other to create a visual language of rare power in contemporary art.
Take “Held Fast and Let Go Likewise” (2020), a canvas that perfectly illustrates this aesthetic of excess. At the center of the composition, bodies intertwine in a sensual and tormented dance, their limbs stretching to the edges of the canvas as if to defy the constraints of the frame itself. The flesh, painted in shades that oscillate between diaphanous lavender and twilight orange, seems animated by its own life, metamorphosing before our eyes into a kaleidoscope of bodily possibilities.
This approach to the body echoes strikingly with philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on the phenomenology of perception. In his “Phenomenology of Perception” (1945), he writes: “The body is our general means of having a world”. Quarles pushes this reflection further by suggesting that our body is not only our anchor in the world but also a site of resistance against the rigid categorizations that society tries to impose on us. In her paintings, the body becomes a battlefield where a constant struggle plays out between normative forces and the desire to escape any fixed definition.
The geometric patterns that fragment her compositions – sharp grids, hallucinated floral motifs, color planes that cut through space like blades of light – are not mere decorative elements. They function as visual metaphors for the social structures that try to contain, define, and limit our identities. In “Never Believe It’s Not So (Never Believe/ It’s Not So)” (2019), a monumental work composed of three panels, these patterns create a complex network of visual constraints through which bodies slip, twist, and reinvent themselves.
Quarles’s technique itself embodies this tension between constraint and freedom. She begins by painting gesturally, letting her body guide the brush in an intuitive dance with the canvas. Then, she photographs her work, manipulates it digitally in Adobe Illustrator, creating patterns that she later reintroduces into the painting via vinyl stencils. This hybridization between the tactile and the digital, between the organic and the geometric, creates a visual tension that keeps the eye in a constant state of alertness.
In “When It’ll Dawn on Us, Then Will It Dawn on Us” (2018), this tension reaches a striking paroxysm. The bodies seem to emerge from a fog of colors to intertwine in an embrace that defies gravity. The flesh painted in shades of lavender and peach merge into one another, creating zones of ambiguity where it becomes impossible to determine where one body begins and another ends. This deliberate confusion is not a stylistic artifice but a philosophical strategy that forces us to question our assumptions about the limits of body and identity.
This questioning resonates deeply with Gilles Deleuze’s thinking about the body without organs, a concept suggesting that the body is not so much a fixed entity as a field of possibilities in constant evolution. Quarles’s figures, with their multiplying limbs and metamorphosing flesh, perfectly embody this idea of a body that refuses any fixed and hierarchical organization. Each canvas thus becomes a laboratory where a new conception of the body is experimented with, freed from traditional anatomical constraints.
In “Tha Nite Could Last Ferever” (2020), Quarles pushes this exploration even further. The nocturnal space she creates becomes a heterotopia in the Foucauldian sense, a place where normal rules of corporeality are suspended. The flesh, painted in shades of deep blue and twilight orange, merges with the ambient darkness while maintaining an intense physical presence. The bodies seem to float in a state of temporal suspension, freed from the constraints of gravity as well as social norms.
Quarles’s use of color is particularly interesting. She deliberately refuses realistic flesh tones, opting instead for a palette that oscillates between vaporous pastels and almost electric saturated tones. This choice is not simply aesthetic, it is deeply political. By painting bodies in shades that transcend any conventional racial categorization, she creates a visual space where identity becomes a question of sensation rather than appearance.
This approach to color is part of a broader reflection on racial identity, nourished by the artist’s personal experience. Born to a black father and a white mother, Quarles has experienced in her own flesh the limitations of traditional racial categories. Her paintings propose a radical alternative to these binary classifications, suggesting that identity is always more complex and more fluid than the boxes in which we try to confine it.
In “Bad Air/Yer Grievances” (2018), this identity fluidity takes a particularly striking form. The bodies seem to be simultaneously dissolved and reconstituted by the geometric patterns that cross the composition. This tension between dissolution and reconstitution evokes the way our identities are constantly negotiated between our lived experience and the social structures that try to define us.
The erotic dimension of her work cannot be ignored, but it largely transcends the simple representation of sensuality. In “Feel’d” (2018), the intertwined bodies create configurations that defy not only anatomy but also our traditional conceptions of intimacy. These entanglements suggest forms of connection that go beyond the physical to touch something more fundamental in human experience.
The very titles of her works, often written in a vernacular phonetics that plays with linguistic conventions, add an additional layer of meaning. By deliberately distorting standard spelling, Quarles creates a linguistic parallel with the way her figures distort anatomical conventions, suggesting that both language and body are social constructs capable of being reinvented.
This constant reinvention is also expressed in her pictorial technique. By combining traditional gestural painting with digital interventions, she creates a visual language that reflects our hyper-connected era while maintaining a deep connection with the tactility of painting. The geometric patterns she incorporates via stencils create breaks in the pictorial surface that function as comments on the fragmentation of contemporary experience.
In “Casually Cruel” (2018), for example, these breaks take on a particularly dramatic dimension. The bodies seem to be literally cut by geometric planes that cross the composition like blades. Yet rather than appearing as victims of this visual violence, the figures seem to use it as an opportunity for transformation, their flesh reorganizing itself according to new configurations that defy any anatomical logic.
The influence of digital technology in her creative process deserves to be highlighted. Unlike many artists who see technology as a threat to traditional painting, Quarles integrates it organically into her practice. The use of Adobe Illustrator is not just a technical tool but fully participates in her reflection on the constructed and manipulable nature of identity. This technological dimension is particularly striking in “Don’t They Know? It’s the End of tha World” (2020). The bodies appear as hybrid entities, halfway between flesh and digital code. The geometric patterns that cross them evoke both computer glitches and architectural fragments, creating a pictorial space where the virtual and physical merge.
Quarles’s work is part of a long tradition of painters who have sought to push the limits of body representation, from Picasso to De Kooning to Bacon. But where her male predecessors often deformed the female body from a perspective of domination or otherness, Quarles creates figures that escape any attempt at possession or categorization by the gaze. This resistance to categorization is also expressed in her way of treating pictorial space. The backgrounds of her canvases constantly oscillate between illusionistic depth and modernist flatness, creating ambiguous environments where bodies seem to simultaneously float and be compressed. This spatial tension reinforces the sense of instability and constant transformation that characterizes her work.
In “Peer Amid (Peered Amidst)” (2019), this spatial ambiguity reaches a dizzying level of complexity. The bodies seem to exist simultaneously in multiple dimensions, their limbs crossing different planes of reality as if navigating between parallel universes. This multiplication of spaces echoes Leibniz’s theory of possible worlds, suggesting that each identity contains within itself an infinity of potentialities.
The recurring motifs in her work – windows, grids, patterned fabrics – function as metaphors for these social structures that try to contain and define our identities. But the bodies she paints systematically refuse to conform to these frames. They overflow, contort, find escape routes, creating what I would call a “choreography of resistance”.
This resistance takes on a particularly powerful dimension in her installations, where she extends her pictorial explorations to three-dimensional space. In these works, the viewer is physically involved in questioning limits and boundaries, their own body becoming an integral part of the artistic experience.
The political dimension of her work cannot be underestimated. In a world where questions of identity are at the center of many social debates, Quarles’s work proposes a radical alternative to binary categorizations. She suggests that our true nature perhaps lies precisely in our ability to transcend rigid definitions, to exist in a constant state of flux. This political proposition is expressed with particular force in her most recent works, where the tension between constraint and freedom reaches new heights. In “Gone on Too Long” (2021), the bodies seem to literally struggle against the limits of the canvas, their limbs stretching to the impossible in a desperate attempt to escape the constraints imposed on them.
But what makes Quarles’s work truly remarkable is that she transforms this struggle into a celebration of possibility. Despite the implicit violence in some of her bodily deformations, her paintings radiate with a fierce joy, a vital affirmation of the freedom to be oneself in all its complexity. Christina Quarles’s work represents much more than a simple exploration of identity or a technical innovation in painting. It constitutes a radical proposition about the very nature of human existence, suggesting that our true essence perhaps lies precisely in our ability to transcend the categories that try to define us. Her work offers a space of freedom where ambiguity is not a source of confusion but of infinite possibilities.
