Chantal Joffe
Victoria Miro , London, UK
Chantal Joffe, Untitled (2010)
The subjects in Chantal Joffe’s current exhibition at Victoria Miro may not be strictly conventional beauties, but they do adhere to a certain archetypal allure, both doe-eyed and complex. Comprising seven large oil paintings downstairs, and 11 various-sized paintings upstairs in airy one-room spaces, all of the works feature women, mostly solitary portraits.
Given that the paintings are so large (almost all are well over a metre squared) the brushstrokes are effortlessly slick, the figures’ limbs statuesque and vigorously depicted. Joffe does not specifically state who the portraits are of, aiming instead to create hybrid representatives of feminine identity; although all the paintings are untitled it is obvious that she has drawn deep from the well of female iconography. By posing the women in generic positions – a furtive glance over an exposed shoulder, a kneeling sex-kitten with bare legs and a far-away look – she creates portraits that make the viewer both want to devour but yet feel excluded from.
In one untitled work from 2010, a woman distractedly touches her neck as if seeking comfort. Her high collared, dark dress and severely fastened hair render her whimsically bookish. Her shadowy profile denies us an exact personality, yet her image surmises the definitive Victorian female writer, perhaps Emily Dickinson or one of the Brontë sisters.
Joffe uses a very specific palette: for flesh-tones she uses the palest of peaches combined with tawny off-greys, smudgy denim blues and liver-coloured mauves serving to accentuate their contours. In contrast her backgrounds are dramatic coal blacks and rich dove-greys. Although a great deal can be said about the conceptual reading of her work, in particular her exploration of the male gaze and the idea of femininity being a social construct, Joffe is essentially a painter’s painter. Her succulent swathes of paint and splashy, glorious lines suggest the sheer pleasure she must surely take in making work. She artfully balances her compositions, taking full advantage of the horizontal lines provided by a bra-strap or the V-shape point of a shirt-collar. She is particularly strong at employing the use of pattern via the fabrics and wallpapers that the figures wear/ interact with.
Joffe’s references vary widely from the great canon of European painting; Picasso for his bold lines, Ingres and Vermeer for their composition, it is Joffe’s extraordinary ability to describe character that makes her work highly reminiscent of another of Victoria Miro’s represented artists Alice Neel. However, Joffe’s practice can be firmly positioned in the contemporary, emitting a similar vivacity to Stella Vine’s and sharing a fresh and highly stylised composition strategy to that of Alex Katz.
Another untitled work from 2010 is quite literally a poster girl for Joffe’s oeuvre. In it a rheumy-eyed young woman gazes balefully out at an angle. The thoughts, emotions and even sexual orientation of the woman remain ambiguous. Her exposed fleshy thigh transmits a throb luscious, carnal power, only to be confused by her closed, vulnerable posture. Simultaneously a frightened girl and filmic seductress she epitomizes the fact that the depiction of women in 2011 remains as undefined and complex as it did 200 years ago.
E.M. Nicholls
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