Chantal Joffe
Modest in scale for an artist more often given to monumental proportions, Untitled (Boy) appears not so much a youth, as the title suggests, as a sultry cherry-lipped movie star seen in performed contemplation. Cropped close, the figure looks off with a sidelong glance, his raised arm – hand reaching to his chin in the universal sign for ‘thinking’ – casting a violet shadow against his white shirt. One reads in this posturing a sense of shifty insecurity. Vulnerability and the complexity of being as reflected in body language, affect, and dress is a lasting preoccupation of Chantal Joffe’s, as are the subtle discrepancies between what her subjects consciously and unconsciously convey. “We can't see ourselves. That's the human dilemma, isn't it?” she asks. “We’re always wondering, how is the world seeing us?” The many selves she pictures appear neither permanent nor solid but provisionally described and always subject to change, identity being essentially capricious and forever in flux.
b.1969, St Albans
“I paint people. I guess that’s probably a good place to start,” Chantal Joffe says, repeating simply, “I paint people.” Psychologically revealing, her brush loaded with colour and feeling, which spills in drips across her canvases, Joffe pursues an emotional liveliness that extends beyond the likeness of the individuals she describes to a more elusive sense of their personhood. Never sentimental, however sincerely felt, her work is characterised by a candour and wit tempered by her reflections on loss and ageing. Described in loosely gestural brushstrokes, her impressions are painted from fashion advertorials, assorted found photographs, family snapshots – “the more awkward and bad the photo, the better the painting turns out” – from life, and from her own reflection seen in the mirror. Of the last, she says that there’s no risk in painting herself, no need to appeal to the sitter’s sense of self, to flatter, to idealise (not that she ever indulges such impulses – she recounts the expressions of her subjects when she turns the canvas towards them as uniformly taken aback). Distilling a sense of a person in a given moment, Joffe describes her compositions as anchors in time. “When I’m painting, I have the sense that it’s all a kind of present tense, as if our ghosts are all still here, everywhere all at once.” Narrative is implicit in the artist’s work. Even her own features, she says of a series of self-portraits made following the end of a years-long relationship, became characters of a kind, her shifting countenance a stage against which they play out. Attentive to nuance, to particularities, to beauty, her works reflect on the intricacies of being in relation to the self and others, be it intimately or imaginatively.