Elise Corpataux

spring owns everything

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March 26 - May 8, 2021

Opening Friday, March 26   12 - 19h

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Hello college joys! Idylls of jejunity, every flame an epic, beginnings and sunrises. Moments etched on an unfilled memory chest, before repetition and rejection and repetition of rejection repeat like silkscreens upon life’s canvas. Death and Disaster. The work of Elise Corpataux is crafted in the space between flashes of yearning, dreams and reality, societally fixed, but felt all the same. Corpataux paints, but she paints with a clinical sterility, the marks built up like incisions and circumcisions. Dr. Van Gogh. When a gestural stroke appears it arrives like a deception with material and formal efficiency. With her sunsets, the awe-some made banal through smartphone failing, there’s something psychotic in the way that sincerity and irony exist in peace, unaware of one another. Utopias of delusion. Scale shifting this digital trash renders the moment of rising and setting charming once more. They have a tenderness of danger. When Ed Ruscha began painting the Hollywood sign it was viewed as a comment on landscape mediated through film. Six decades later we are all filmmakers and everything is mediated and posted and consumed and discarded. What is a painter, but the narcissist who demands that they be the ultimate mediator of images? If every photo captured is unique than every painting must be more so. Replacing the representation of our mythologized world with her name and now, Corpataux dissects artists as the ultimate romance, games spun when the personal makes public. What is any surface but a platform? For etching, for painting, for performing? We share, but we share the same over and over. Amassing likes, if not progress. Corpataux forges the tireless and tired together and, so, the sun rays neither rise nor set but reflect the limbo of beauty and boredom we’ve all been sentenced to.