Metal supports—structures with the hard-line industrial feel of a factory farm’s machinery—fill the space in “DOOM BLOOM,” Theresa Chromati’s show with Dallas’s Tureen gallery this winter.
Their severe edges are softened by the florid tenderness of the prismatic canvases they buttress—and by the fantastical botanical sculptures (so-called scrotum flowers) that wrap around them like vines. A recurring motif for Chromati, the scrotum flower is just one species in the elaborate mythological taxonomy of otherworldly beings that populate her work.
The testicular flora serves as an attendant to the multifaceted “central figure” that presides over her canvases. “[It’s a totem] that’s been woven into my paintings for years at this point,” says the Baltimore-born and -based artist. “It has been a guide, a friend, a listening ear for this central figure, as she stretches, lets go of herself, defines herself.”
Trained as a graphic designer, the 30-year-old has constructed her visual world by positioning layer after layer on top of one another, a process that echoes the way images are fashioned in virtual space. Glitter and felt serve as the erotic paraphernalia of her alien species, deployed to form nipples, a phallus, or secretions.
An impressively supple patinated bronze figure produced for her solo show at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman gallery last spring, along with the scaffold-like supports the artist began making for her show at Veta in Madrid last summer, are the products of Chromati’s recent foray into metal. These works speak to her desire to “expand what’s happening in the realm of the paintings into this realm”—to explore the dissolution of the pictorial fourth wall.
For the artist, it’s all about freedom, dynamism, and movement. Openness and audacity are at the core of her work—“and questions,” she concludes, lots of questions. Chromati’s latest work threads elements from this radically destabilizing symbolic ecosystem through a veil of normality with impressive technical and artistic ingenuity. In her experiments with new dimensions, the artist deepens her focus on the act of processing and reflecting the otherworldliness of humankind itself—“how vast, how nuanced we are” as a species.
For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Giangiacomo Rossetti, and Emma Stern.
