Skin Deep Secrets

It’s hard to know what to feel when looking at Chloe Wise’s new paintings on view at Almine Rech in Brussels. Dauntless in the trashed world, 2024, depicts a naked woman wrapped in a sheer veil. She looks to the side as if to avoid the viewer's gaze or perhaps judgment. However, convulsed with laughter, back bent, chin up, mouth open, eyes squinted, she’s everything but afraid. 

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Wise has always been drawn to this idea of the self and its complexities. The Canadian multimedia artist describes her large, detailed, expressive, and slightly disturbing portraits as “colorful, curious, and kooky.” Her new exhibition, “Torn Clean,” prompts viewers to confront the imperfections within the paintings, revealing the unfiltered essence of the human body.  

From a forced smile to a tube of Aquaphor and a pack of Compeed Blister patches, the elements of the painter’s oeuvre transport, reveal, and overwhelm. Her still life compositions of lush fruits and cheeses hint at the decay. Mirrors underscore the fleeting nature of consumption and pleasure, the inevitable passing of time, and the messy experience of life in a media-saturated world.

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Wise is known for her tongue-in-cheek works like Bagel No. 5, 2014, a classic bagel-and-cream cheese held together by a Chanel chain—which drew the attention of Simon Porte Jacquemus, who commissioned the artist to paint his Spring/Summer 2019 campaign. The artist’s 2017 exhibition “Of False Beaches and Butter Money” at Almine Rech in Paris explored how individuals present themselves in a world obsessed with appearances. There, in her Paris debut, she probed at ideas around femininity and motherhood via images of dairy, from traditional images like milk maids to almond milk in Evian bottles. 

Always challenging the perception of the self, Wise’s new portraits are cropped to frame, and isolate, the subject’s faces. Wise dares her viewers to grasp the women’s distress and agitation beneath the surface. She works with beige as her base—the “neutral” tone often used to represent skin and the default for Band-Aids, which the artist referred to as “imposters, fake skin meant to take on the role of the scab–the scab’s scab.” Images, similarly reveal and conceal. For Wise, what’s underneath, raw and exposed, is most interesting.

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“Torn Clean” is on view at Almine Rech Brussels from April 24 to May 25, 2024 at 20 rue de l'Abbaye, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.