‘How can you paint all this? Put your body in the middle of it and hope to catch a flash as something vanishes or changes state. The only way to walk in the crowd is to submit to its sleepwalker pace, and maybe these pictures are a little like that. Lido, vaporetto, tramezzini on a plate. Everything is gorgeous, everything contains its secret evidence of death.’
Olivia Laing
Victoria Miro
Chantal Joffe - The Eel
Paintings
At the Victoria Miro gallery - until October 21 - The Eel is an exhibition of new paintings by Chantal Joffe, completed this summer during a residency with the gallery in Venice. Over the summer, the artist has worked in the gallery’s studio in Venice, completing paintings – self-portraits; paintings of her daughter, Esme; still lifes – against the backdrop of the city at its high-season peak, a place of magnificence, stimulation, pleasure, excess and decay, endlessly toppling into one another.
The exhibition is accompanied by The Spoils, a new essay by Olivia Laing: ‘How can you paint all this? Put your body in the middle of it and hope to catch a flash as something vanishes or changes state. The only way to walk in the crowd is to submit to its sleepwalker pace, and maybe these pictures are a little like that. Lido, vaporetto, tramezzini on a plate. Everything is gorgeous, everything contains its secret evidence of death.’
Chantal Joffe
Calle al Ponte de Anzolo - Puro Lino - 2023
‘Esme dreaming on the vaporetto, chin up,
rosy sunburned arms encircling
a clear expanse of
blue.’
Chantal Joffe - Esme on the Vaporetto - 2023
Esme Joffe
Chantal Joffe - Esme in Giudecca - 2023
Copyright Chantal Joffe Courtesy artist and Victoria Miro‘These pictures are sloshing with time. Longueurs and languor,
time running out or stuck on the dial.
Days sweet as cream,
a ferry to catch.’
Chantal Joffe - Blue Moon Spiaggia with Fruit - 2023
Copyright Chantal Joffe Courtesy artist and Victoria Miro
Chantal Joffe - Zattere - 2023
Andrew Huston, Karole Vail, Victoria Miro and Jane da Mosto
‘Too late at the beach and there’s a warning of a storm.
The umbrella guy’s packing up and the sky’s so overcast
the sand has gone green.
Soft bodies like bread rolls in their beach clothes,
baring white flesh.’
Chantal Joffe - Lido - 2023
Henrietta and Mario Codognato
‘Everything is very beautiful,
a cannoli
with a cherry on top.’
Chantal Joffe - Cannoli - 2023