Opening Thursday, October 30, 6-9pm
Post Times is pleased to announce Tales from the Picture People, a solo exhibition by Andrew Chapman.
Chapman’s work exists in the realm of the uncanny. While evoking the history of abstraction, the work also summons the nuances and contradictions inherent to the early inception of the photographic image. Each of these mediums - painting and photography - have had an immeasurable pull on the human psyche towards the need for decipherment. Within those inquiries belies a deep web of beliefs, opticality, and the superimposition of meaning.
For Chapman, painting is an emblem of a resolute, idiosyncratic record. At once both an ineffable yet materially grounded object, there is an aspect of his work that is almost forensic in nature. It wants to be linked; to a time, to a thing, to a place, to an idea. The surface properties of the works are often akin to the emulsion of a printed photograph, where the information and ground become fused. This is achieved through a meticulous execution of various methods, and the studio becomes a sieve through which a range of references and techniques are carefully folded into the apparatus of painting. Attention to details between surface and form reflect an intrinsic conceit: the slipperiness of cognition, perception, and explication is woven into the fabric of painting, like a strange reverse engineering of some phenomenological subject.
At the foundation of Chapman’s work is what he describes as the search for “a certain type of realism within abstraction”. Or namely, within the unknown. Tales from the Picture People marks a concerted shift by the artist to create a more explicit bridge between abstraction and representation within his practice, and towards a new type of psychological register. At either pole there is always an element of beguilement. They are meticulous, obsessive, and enigmatic paintings that eschew any discernable form of painterly mark making. Eerily existing as fully formed objects, Chapman often obscures hints of process. The result is a surface that feels both technological and tactile: a digital blur rendered by hand. The artist describes these works as “portraits of circulation”—images less about individuals than about the collective systems that produce, distribute, and consume representation. His figures appear half-formed, fading between likeness and erasure, the crisp edges of the photographic source dissolving into a painterly haze.
Tales from the Picture People lays forth a body of works haunted by the desire for recognition, and the uneasy intimacy of being both seen and subsumed. Faces and forms multiply, overlap, or vanish into the background, suggesting an image economy in which selfhood is perpetually uploaded, flattened, and forgotten.
Andrew Chapman (b. 1980) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from Stanford University and his BFA from California College of the Arts. Selected solo exhibitions include The Meeting, New York; Independent, New York; Et al., San Francisco; and BANK, Shanghai, China. Selected group exhibitions include Balice Hertling, Paris; Petra Bibeau, New York; Daniela Elbahara, Mexico City; and House of Seiko, San Francisco.