At the Heart of How We're Doing

Aaaaargh!!! That’s the sound of how I feel every time I come across Celeste Rapone’s work. And unable to see her recently opened London solo at Josh Lilley Gallery, the feeling is even more intense. Especially now that the gallery added the exhibition photos to their website, and my IG feed shows friends and acquaintances seeing these mind-melters in person.

It always feels almost fake to express excitement about some artists and their work. But no matter how hard I try to keep my cool and tell myself, “you’ve seen these before, it’s no big deal,” it still happens, and the effort only makes it worse. I felt that when I saw Rapone’s large canvas in Basel and was borderline annoyed by how much that single work packed and how it glued me to it. So I had to do this post as soon as I saw the photos.

I always feel like I could write a full-length exhibition text about each of Rapone’s paintings. But I’m gonna focus, or try to focus, on one thing. I’m gonna go past the elephants on the canvas, the male protagonists appearing next to her clunky, grace-impaired muses, what they contribute to her narratives (besides the occasional man bun or uber cargos), or how familiar some of those dynamics feel. I’m also gonna stay away from the beautifully glitchy way she depicts cramped hands and feet (so much for them being the test of a good painter), or the absolute collapse of any pictorial or logical hierarchy. Or the bra skin marks, pantyhose rips, price tags, candy wraps, and a full assortment of things that make you go hmmm. 

Instead, I’ll just point to the paint application and handling. The raw, nervous, anxious hatching passages forming wannabe solid surfaces, the shaky lines, or the flat-out mayhem of marks and twirls miraculously solidifying into a functional conveyance of light and volume. These not only fit the atmosphere of the portrayed or even caricatured scenes, but also underline, if not fully define it. So, I urge you to zoom in on these and try to pinpoint that slippery moment where utter mess tips into an embarrassingly awkward, but somehow consonant whole. What better way to explore and present How We’re Doing! —Saša Bogojev