Tag: Mexico

By Naomi Oko

Embodying what it truly means to be a contemporary artist, Nicole Chaput profoundly toys with and reshapes the dated, conventional, and familiar representation of women and femininity throughout art history. Deeper than the need for expression via painting, is her calling to be a storyteller. She stands as a messenger for and a mouthpiece to the feminine entities she creates, mediating between the feminine in its unruly essence and its traditional representation in materiality. Chaput disrupts established but tired norms, actively manipulating anatomical forms and the materiality of the canvas itself in her search to blur the boundaries between the juxtaposition of what is good and bad, celestial and demonic, or inside and outside. Her oeuvre stands as an excitingly interesting and new inspection and exploration of traditionally feminine portrayal, challenging the ever-present and ever-stifling oppression of existence under the scrutiny of the male gaze. Chaput’s figures serve as more than mere eye candy but rather, as she describes it herself; [as manifestations of the] “defiance and resilience born from enduring hostility. Similar to pearls, which form unique layers as a defense mechanism, her paintings evolve organically, embracing their own anomalies as a testament to their existence.”

Nicole Chaput, born in 1995, is a painter who lives and works in Mexico City. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018) and participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019). She has received numerous grants and fellowships from prestigious institutions during her artistic career; and has shown her work in the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. Embalsamada con picante [Embalmed with spice] is a solo exhibition by Nicole Chaput curated by Isabel Sonderéguer at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, that ran from February 10 – April 21, 2024.

Your presentation of femininity and comparison to traditional representations in art calls to mind angels, and the comparison between biblically accurate representation versus secular Western representation in terms of accuracy, conformity, and digestibility. Can you explain this further?

My work is pretty intuitive and research-based because it’s trying to inspect the inspector and the inspector is Western art history. I’m really interested in how women have been represented in that area. And for that, I needed to read a lot about the dissonances. Your first question is so on point because It’s a great example of how I connect art history with storytelling and how an image can tell the story of a misrepresented body to create an idea of femininity. 

I constantly get into discussions about Mary Magdalene. I am obsessed with her as a figure because just by seeing how she has been represented throughout history, you can get a [sense] of the ideals of women at a certain time and the ideologies that paved the way. For example, how women must obey, how women must not act, what is considered beautiful or sexy, for example. 

I feel like I created this algorithm of how my research is catalyzed and by chance, I ran into this image of Mary Magdalene covered in hair, like she’s an animal. I became very upset with how she was being represented so I began to question what happened that she had to be represented in that way. I kept reading about her in the bible and in the actual text there was nothing that mentioned or cued why she ended up being represented as an animal. 

Reading about the history of her representation, you can tell that, at first, she’s depicted as this woman who is bathing Jesus’ feet. She discovers Jesus when he is risen, but also by Tintoretto and all these other pictures, she becomes this very sexy woman who has long hair, and then she becomes an animal in a cave in France, then she becomes a hermit doing penance for her sins.

I think that the disruption between the actual tale and how art has illustrated the story is very divergent. A lot of people at the time were illiterate, so images became a theatricalized version of the story and the agenda that the religion was pushing. Iconography has been a storyteller throughout time and images have their own language that we don’t all have access to what we are reading or who is the writer. I think that is the main perversity of images that we see there, we don’t have enough information to analyze who the person saying all of this is or why we are having these subliminal images planted in our heads. I think that happened with Mary Magdalene and it happens today with Kendall Jenner selling us lipstick, this image of a woman that appears to you like a vision followed by this internalization of that face or that idea of sensuality, or beauty, or the grotesque. 

I’m very interested in how these images are like divine apparitions or hallucinations, we can ignore them or dismiss them, but they’ll make some sort of impact on how we read history, or how we read the body. 

What sort of reaction do you imagine your work elicits in the ideal audience? Have you had the opportunity to be with some of your audience to see them reacting to your work for the first time?

Yes, it’s one of the things I enjoy the most. The first ones that come to mind are when I had my show Venus Atomica at Galería Karen Huber. It was my first formal solo Gallery show and the last day I visited, I saw this whole family taking a selfie with one of the works as if it was this deity of some sort. I wanted those works to feel like they had power or like they had a soul contained inside of them. It was great when I saw that because they’re doing this touristy thing where they are visiting this goddess-form that they don’t completely understand, but they find beautiful, important, and mysterious.

Recently, in the show I have in Museo de Carrillo Gil, called Embalsamada con Picante, there was this little girl who was about four years old with her dad who was also carrying her sister. He was entering to see the work and she was very scared to go inside the room. Then slowly, she walked in grabbing onto his legs and she pointed out one of the works that is like a medusa. She was crying and I asked her dad why she was crying and instead of saying she was sad or something he said, “she’s emotional.” In Spanish, that didn’t sound like, “Oh yeah, she’s being emotional or irrational,” it was like, “she’s feeling a lot.” It was so beautiful to see how this little girl could connect to that image and feel her feelings. And that translated into emotion and not automatically demonizing her feelings. It was great to see how she slowly leaned into the room and started getting to know these figures. 

Can you expand on the celestial nature of your work?

I am very inspired by images of celestial beings and also by Celestial beings from the underworld. In Spanish, I like to call these figures, “infra cuerpos,” which would mean “under bodies”, but in Spanish, “infra” doesn’t connote something that is below. The “belowness” is more like they are from this esoteric hell, so they are ardent, not underneath. So, they are bodies that are in this area of not well behaved. Like Mary Magdalene, she is both celestial and this is also [depicted as] this whore that should burn in flames. 

For me, it’s important to emphasize the narrative of how painting can fictionalize itself, similar to the ways women too can fictionalize themselves. Via my installation, we’re able to explore just how those two can come together to create an experience of uncovering and discovering something new while being completely disoriented by your understanding of its ingredients separately but confused and disoriented by their combination and juxtapositioning. One is left with questions like; is it the past or the future? Are we in heaven or hell? Are they angelic or demonic? I think that all of those contradictions coexist in one body: the superficial with the subcutaneous and the visceral with the hyper-airbrushed face. Disorienting someone makes them have to relearn where they are to reorient themselves. 

Your wooden sculptures from Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca resemble ritualistic objects in their form and context. Would you consider the beautification objects to stand as a metaphor for the sacredness of the routines they help in? 

I think that these routines are sacred in an intuitive way, but also in a capitalist way. That was the commentary I was doing in the show or, the question I was asking/answering. These objects were very beautiful and intricate, and I wanted to capture the magic of when you go to the makeup store and just how the packaging is so beautiful to make it an object of desire. The packaging just projects this feeling of luxury and how it’s going to give you the power to be beautiful. Beauty itself is the most political thing because it’s guarded by the most colonial and patriarchal standards. I think that beauty is this thing where we either have the power or we don’t. Makeup is this thing that can give us the power to be more beautiful, more captivating, have more power, and therefore take up more space.

…Makeup and beauty constantly create these images to orient ourselves throughout territories, how we move around the world, how our body is just existing, and how it’s perceived by the other.

This is a construct by consumerist culture but also, I think that there is something empowering in creating these rituals for oneself because they situate you in your own body. They can help you create an appearance or a mask. There is this great anecdote that I love about Marisol the artist, who I’m greatly inspired by. She goes to this party and she’s wearing a Japanese mask. Everyone at the party wonders who she is and asks her to remove the mask. She doesn’t remove it until a while later after they keep pressing her. She removes the mask and has full makeup on, so they can’t see her face. 

I think that’s such a great anecdote because makeup and beauty constantly create these images to orient ourselves throughout territories, how we move around the world, how our body is just existing, and how it’s perceived by the other. Being seen by the other is very present in my life. In me being a woman and living in Mexico, the eye of the other is always there. It just doesn’t go away, it’s ever-present. Haunting, even. 

Painters construct how the eye flows in a picture plane. This is done by contrast, color, texture, et cetera. Formally painting marks draws the path for the eye in a place. I think that similarly, women do this all the time to control when we are seen and when we are not. In that same way, I think it is important in my work to be able to give the women I am representing, volume. Because the idea of flatness and volume in a woman’s body is this canonical culture of where you should have flesh and where you shouldn’t. At the same time, an image in art history is flat and without volume, even volume as sound and volume as shape and space. It’s not decided by the women that are being represented. It’s decided by someone else. If my work would have a volume, I think it would be very high and it wouldn’t be very pleasant. I think about the voices these women would have, and how some of them would maybe cry, like the myth of La Llorona in Mexico, who hauntingly cries for her children.

I had never thought about the voices they would have, but I think it would be interesting because we know so much about, for example, Frida Kahlo as an image, but her voice is very mysterious to us.  And doing that exercise of how strong the voice of these women would be, or how much space it would occupy is important as well. The voice matters as much as the face and the face gives it the voice. As I said, Mary Magdalene would be one of the mothers of my sculptures and Marisol would be one of my mothers artistically. I love to think about genealogy, making a genealogical tree, and to think of contemporary ideas as family inside the world we are creating as artists.

You make use of a lot of accessorizing and beautification and yet, the figures still come out resembling these alien strange beings. Do you see your work as an intentional commentary on how people, women especially, go through so much in the process of beautification that sometimes they end up morphing into whole other beings? 

I think that there is this collective dysmorphia of how we want to look and how we want others to see us so much that it’s never enough and it becomes opaque. Many models have been instrumentalized to sell more things, right? And to endure this concept of European beauty standards that leave a lot of women out and create this very narrow idea of femininity. A lot of these Hollywood icons are canons of beauty, but when they start aging, they are not the same as the image we have of them in our heads. I think that these tools for beautification, they’re anthropomorphized women who are grabbed by women to beautify themselves and then be objectified. It’s like this cycle where subjects and objects bleed into each other in a way that they’re almost inseparable.

And in that sense, there’s also this funny aspect or fun aspect where the tools with their manuals, they can pull your hair, or they can bite you. They have some sort of autonomy. These wooden tools, the sculptures, have a user manual that is kind of surreal and it speaks to the power of these tools. For example, the mascara wand is an Oracle or the mirror and spits out a flesh-eating worm. I wouldn’t want to look in that mirror. It goes to question these beauty icons, and what their mirror view looks like. What do they see? Especially for [those who] have done so much plastic surgery that they have become totally different people. I can imagine that when you go through that much physical transformation, your psyche is transformed as well. That physical trauma of the surgery, I feel like it speaks to a trauma that is inside. And that trauma inside that wound, I’m very moved by it.

And I think that the image we have as women is that of a wound. And I wonder how we can heal it, or what it would take to look at ourselves without having our eyes played by the male gaze. I think that is the question that encompasses all my work. I don’t have an answer yet, but as I’m making it, I feel more at peace with looking at myself in a mirror.

Beautification has become such a mechanical process in the way it’s carried out and even spoken of, that it’s kind of lost its sacred magic. Your work in Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca ritualizes, romanticizes, and even sexualizes the process involved. Is this something we should all be opening our minds towards when viewing, despite the oppressive nature of conformity?  

Yes, I think it could be very liberating to start seeing everything as a story or as fiction and as different characters. In this work, the comb, the mirror, the mascara brush, and the powder brush are all characters. The installation was inspired by the Beauty and the Beast rose which has this beautiful pink light emanating from it. Next to the rose is a mirror where Belle can see the rest of the world. Instead of seeing herself, she can see as if she were looking at something that is not there. So, that kind of magical tool or magical process I think can lead us to self-invention.

The power of self-invention comes with language, with what each sign means. Having long lashes has certain connotations, having long nails as well. They’re also more related to how animals spread their nails when they want to attack. I think that the way we accessorize our bodies and fictionalize our appearances is by using prosthetics like lashes and nails, for example. All of these prosthetics add to the story of our body. I think we can find a way where those prosthetics are not only accessories for the other, but, thinking about Wonder Woman, where all her accessories have superpowers, like self-defense. If our prosthetics could have superpowers, or if we can imagine, through fiction, what the things we add to our bodies could do? Not just in terms of image, but in terms of narrative. 

Trends and beauty standards change, courtesy of pop culture and mass media consumption. Women’s bodies kind of go in and out of style, almost like vehicles. I like the contrast created between your representation of women as complete sufficient beings as opposed to the mass message being pushed of women eternally needing changes and tweaks just to fit in and exist. How does your work touch more on this topic?

In Embalsamada con picante, I created one woman with three heads, three torsos, and three legs that has 27 possible combinations. What was important to me was that each fragment was autonomous and was a whole, not a part. All the bottoms have heads and faces. The legs have a face, the skirt has a face, and the snail creature that looks kind of like Naomi Campbell has a face as well. 

I think of fragments as a pole that is cut from a larger portion of a thing but can live on its own. When you cut one limb off a salamander, another one grows. I love how Donna Haraway says that maybe we should all cut off our limbs to have new bodies that are monstrous and surprise us in their own regenerative processes. Part of my hope with this show and with my work is that there is a wound and I am going off from an iconographic stump. I think the iconography is basically women trapped inside geometric shapes, their bodies are stumps, and they’re mutilated, so I try to imagine what can grow from those stumps and that regenerative process of the icon and the body.

It’s so amazing to do the exercise of imagining what would grow if we continued having the body grow out of its frame. I think that the irregular figures of all my canvases speak to the intent of having this regenerative process that has its own functionality and intelligence. It’s not necessarily thinking about the other, but it’s thinking about how it exists in the world and the necessities it has; it needs to survive or to evolve even.

You can find more of Nicole Chaput’s work on her Instagram.