Clinton Tolley on Chantal Wnuk
3 Phones, 2018, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.
[Image description: In the painting’s darkened foreground, the abstracted figures of two women sit on a couch. Their skin and clothing are rendered in deep blues, greens, purples, and browns. They both hold cell phones up to their faces. The figure on the left holds her forearm over her face, as if to shield her eyes from the phone’s glowing screen. The face of the figure on the right is indistinguishable, except for her white eyes. Behind them, the brightly lit interior of the room is visible. In it are two houseplants, two doorways on the back wall, and the red outline of a piece of art on the wall. In one of the doorways sits a highly-abstracted figure, with faint lines suggesting they are holding a cell phone.]
It is as hard to be against love as it is hard to know what love really is, and it is sometimes hardest to know whether love is something real at all – let alone to know how to love well. Romanticism is at root a faith and hope in love, in its existence, in its power of sustenance, transformation, redemption – of nature, of people, of institutions, of all of history and then some. Chantal Wnuk’s recent paintings give new shape and light to the sideways dialectics that cloud the work of eros and pathos in the vicissitudes of the new century.
The immediate joys of Wnuk’s paintings come from their gentle welcome-ramp into engagement. Her titles often mention certain aspects of the quotidian found within the works (times of day, places nearby, ordinary though emotionally significant actions and experiences). The paintings themselves then deliver just these contents, in the alluringly accessible pictorial language Wnuk has crafted over her years in Houston, Austin, and for the past half-decade, San Diego. The paintings are centered upon largely figurative forms – persons, sole, in couples, sometimes in threes (though usually then two more directly paired, one set off), often in familiar settings (on the beach, in lounge chairs, on sofas, at tables, with drinks in strawed cups nearby), often occupied with their phones – with many of the lines and planes of the figures and especially their surroundings undergoing a soft abstraction, the easing of definition.
From Sea Foam and Cell Phones, 2019, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.
[Image description: Three women, whose skin is rendered in peach and pink tones, at the beach. In the foreground, two of the women sit at a table, facing the viewer but looking to the left. The table’s top is scattered with objects, including scraps of food, a fork, a comb, and two cell phones with their screens lit up. A cup of water tips over, about to spill. The woman on the left is cut off by the edge of the painting, and only her right side is visible. She is wearing a blue bikini top and a straw hat. Next to her sits a woman in a blue and brown polka dot tank top. She holds her brown hair as if to tie it up with the red hairband on her wrist. In the upper left of the image, a third woman in a blue swimsuit sits behind the two at the table. In the background, two palm trees on the beach are visible. The painting is rendered in both brushy strokes and delicate lines.]
At the same time, however, the scenes are made to bristle, lightly but decidedly, by Wnuk’s heightening other lines of demarcation, through her use especially of color contrasts in the depiction of the source and angles of lighting within the scene, as well as through her orientation of the lines of sight onto, and from, the eyes of the figures themselves. Here Wnuk’s address to the viewer begins to take on further dimensions, as we come to recognize that this second layer of geometry is meant to convey not merely or even primarily a spatial positioning, but rather a social – or better: spiritual – distance present between the viewer and the figures, present among the figures themselves and in their relation to their surroundings. And it is here that Wnuk becomes the acute cartographer of a specific though dense range of the degrees of being alone while being together.
Left: Steuben, Wisconsin 2pm, 2018, oil on paper on panel, 24 x 30 in.
[Image description: A view from behind of a person with pink skin and brown hair, sitting in a lounge chair. Through the chair’s green webbing, the figure’s head, green shirt, and knees are visible. There is a brushy wash of various shades of green and a blue sky in the background.]
Right: Steuben, Wisconsin 2am, 2018, oil on paper on panel, 24 x 30 in.
[Image description: A view from behind of a woman in a red tank top sitting in a lounge chair. Through the chair’s yellow horizontal bands, her head, back, and knees are visible. A cell phone with a glowing screen rests on her right leg. Her skin tone and hair are a surreal mix of pink, purple, and blue. In the background, a dark hill rises in the violet sky under a sliver of yellow moon.]
The episodes in Wnuk’s paintings catalog the economy of feels and desires that pull us toward and push us away from one another. The distance left standing, the being ‘away’, is signaled perhaps most straightforwardly by Wnuk’s compositional strategy of orienting the faces and especially the gazes of subjects so as to signal in them various forms or degrees of absence from the viewer’s own eyes. In some (Steuben, Wisconsin 2pm and Steuben, Wisconsin 2am; compareThe Beach Closest to My House 1pm), the figures are positioned with their backs fully turned to the viewer, who meets the figures only through the mesh-strapped backs of the outdoor lounge-chairs upon which they recline. In others (I Live by the Ocean Now, Again; End of an Error; Three Graces [below]; compare Personal Rain Shield and Not Like That (Netflix)), the centered figures face forward, but are now resting their faces downwards upon tabletops, leaving only the flow of hair and the back of their neck in view.
Left: I Live by the Ocean Now, Again, 2013, oil on paper, 11 x 14 in.
[Image description: A woman stands in front of an abstracted ocean, facing away from the viewer. She wears a green striped sweater and has long hair streaked with black and white. Her right arm bends up and over so that her elbow is resting on top of her head. A mauve and blue sky stretches out over the horizon line.]
Right: End of an Error, 2013, oil on canvas, 20 x 26 in.
[Image description: A light-skinned woman wearing a magenta and white striped shirt sits at a table. She bends over and rests her head face-down, her long brown hair spreading out over the table. A red Solo cup sits close to the woman’s right. Behind her is the beige interior of the room with a white rectangle suggesting a window.]
In others the figures actively cover their own faces, either entirely – with a sweater (Sorry for Being Sad) – or partly, with fingers rubbing salt and sun from eyes (Kind of Floating (Coronado with a Pool Noodle), with a crossed forearm (3 Phones), with a book (Sunday Shadow).
Left: Sorry for Being Sad, 2017, oil on paper, 9 x 12 in.
[Image description: A loose, brushy rendering of a light-skinned woman sitting at a table, facing the viewer. Deep purple paint spreads across the maroon tabletop, as if some liquid has spilled. The woman is wearing a blue sweater with gray dots and pulls its neck up to obscure her face. The interior of the room is visible behind her. Above her right shoulder is a window with a view of a palm tree, and on the windowsill sit a pencil and other objects.]
Right: Kind of Floating (Coronado with Pool Noodle), 2016, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
[Image description: A woman with white and blue skin and dark hair floats in the ocean. An abstracted view of her body is visible beneath the water’s surface, while her shoulders and head emerge. Her hands are raised to cover her eyes. The ends of an orange pool noodle are visible on either side of the figure’s shoulders. In the background, a brown landmass extends from the right edge of the image.]
And even when Wnuk allows a view in which a figure’s eyes are not fully obstructed, they are still visibly marked by absence in the form of a looking askance. In the extreme their focal powers are whited out altogether (3 Phones); more commonly Wnuk sends their gaze indeterminately past the viewer into some unseen background (From Sea Foam and Cell Phones), toward some other time or place (Drawing about Touching [below]), toward their phone (Ignoring the Ocean; compare Touched/Screen) – or, at best, leaving what could have been a direct holding of eye contact ambiguously split between a phone in the mid-ground, a finger extended in the foreground, and/or something in your own general direction (Salt Water).
Left: Ignoring the Ocean, 2014, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in.
[Image description: A light-skinned woman, her face largely obscured by her long dark hair, holds a cup to her mouth with her left hand. Her right hand holds a pink cellphone with a glowing screen. She faces toward the left edge of the painting. Behind her is an abstracted depiction of the beach and sky. The woman’s clothing and the landscape are rendered in dark purples and blues, giving the work a distinctly moody effect.]
Right: Salt Water, 2019, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.
[Image description: Two women sit on the ground, with an ocean horizon line, purple sky, and setting sun behind them. The image is tightly cropped, with only portions of each figure in the painting’s frame. The figure on the right’s arm extends toward the viewer, with her hand looming in the painting’s foreground. The figure on the left of the image lays behind the one on the right, with her face partially obscured. She is wearing an orange and blue patterned shirt, looking at a cell phone with a glowing screen in her hand. Both women’s skin tone is a surreal mix of peach, blue, green, and purple.]
In some of Wnuk’s handlings of what has become one of the most frequent forms of direct self-presentation – the cellphone ‘selfie’ – what her versions reveal is only: oneself as to one’s shadow, the shadow of oneself as oneself (Alone and Looking Down; compare Still Alone and Looking Down). What is presented is the self withdrawn into a faint outline, a form of being alone even from oneself, a looking upon oneself as not even reflectedly present (as in the mirror-selfie), as all but absent.
Left: Alone and Looking Down, 2019, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
[Image description: An abstracted blue-gray figure on a background that is thickly painted in a range of sandy colors. The figure holds up a small vertical rectangle in their left hand. At the top right corner of the image is a blue, green, and purple area of paint, lined in white. The effect is that of the viewer looking down from the subject’s perspective as they snap a cell phone picture of their shadow on the sand and beach blanket.]
Right: The Beach Closest to My House 2pm, 2019, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
[Image description: A light-skinned woman sitting on the beach, with a view of her left hand, legs, and feet, the sand and ocean outstretched before them. She holds in her hand a cellphone, and on the screen is a view of the scene in front of her. She has bright pink nail polish on her fingers and toes, and her feet are covered in sand. The effect is that of the viewer looking out from the subject’s perspective.]
Even paintings in which the scene is portrayed if from what would be the figure’s own point of view – as in The Beach Closest to My House 2pm, which opens out on to knees, legs, feet, pink-toed nails, half-outstretched onto sand running off to the whites of waves arriving at the top of the frame, the horizon – even here, the viewer itself is not actually given the figure’s own point of focus. What is more, the question of attention is then doubled inside of the frame itself by the phone on the left hand, operating its camera, but with nothing yet obviously centered, with a wandering finger not yet commanding into action.
In this piece in particular, Wnuk’s inroads move further still into the soul of the viewer themselves. Past the desire to identify with the figures, to be oneself absorbed into the scene, past having had the scene itself positioned to block just this, to signal one’s own exclusion, there now arises the still further fraught sense of awe, laced with something akin to melancholy, at the dawning recognition that these very same motions – seemingly so intimate, so fully on the inside of one’s ownmost self – have not only already been anticipated but have been so effectively choreographed by Wnuk herself so as to solicit this quietly disquieting unfolding of feels from the depths of you and from me.
Because they are so successful at putting into effect in us this many-sided doubling back of the movement of pathos and eros – channeling barely our conscious strivings born in inwardness, out toward another, felt to be at once welcoming and withholding, themselves drawn away by something or someone else, with the whole atmosphere now itself permeated with the ambiguity of resonance and estrangement – Wnuk’s paintings begin to softly wring from the viewer the first stages of reckoning with the ghosts in romanticism itself. Even in these darkened days its pulse still quickens, setting communion, connection – love – as the highest form of life, the most divine, that wherein desire and passion unite, where all of existence is most fulfilled. Any unquestioned authority it possesses Wnuk deftly unmoors, orchestrating instead a kind of time-out, a pause for her paintings to ask us what it is exactly we’ve wanted under the name of love in the first place, as well as giving witness, in telegraphed form, to the seemingly endless stages of deferral and refraction present already in even love’s (again, seemingly) most simple stages.
Very Close and Four Inches Taller, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in.
[Image description: A light-skinned man with short black hair in a blue shirt faces away from the viewer and toward a woman standing behind him. The woman’s face is obscured from the viewer by the man’s head. She has long brown hair and skin that is a surreal mix of taupe and blue, and the thin red line of a tank top over her right shoulder. The figures stand in front of a purple wall, with a blue rectangle suggesting a window at the image’s top left corner.]
Wnuk’s ambivalence toward romanticism in its contemporary shades – roughly: in the time of smartphones – come to something of a head in those paintings that might otherwise have been thought to portray straightforward cases of successful resolution of love’s dialectic: couples finally (seemingly) finding their way to love itself. In Wnuk’s hands, however, faces at these key moments of connection or embrace are either turned fully inward upon the couple themselves, away from the viewer (Very Close and Four Inches Taller), or show only a fragment of a closed eye (compare I Wish I Could Paint the Goosebumps I Feel). Both compositional forms keeping the viewer from discerning whether the gazes or spirits of the pairs are themselves truly interlocked, if this really is a moment of fulfillment after all. In Drawing about Touching, the peace and rest and joy of the encircling of lovers’ arms is explicitly interrupted by a look that lives in the indeterminately elsewhere.
Drawing About Touching, 2013, mixed media on paper, 22 x 30 in.
[Image description: In the center of the image, a man and a woman tightly embrace. The man has dark hair and buries his face in the woman’s neck. She has shoulder length hair in white and gray, and her face is abstracted with gray chalk. Around the figures, staccato strokes of white suggest raindrops. The entire drawing is rendered in tones of black and gray, with only faint traces of orange in the woman’s hair and in some of the raindrops. ]
Even here what we encounter always seems to be where love is not yet; little direction is given by Wnuk herself as to even the categories with which we might hope to answer: where and when is love, why and how.
One of the most effective symbols Wnuk uses to indirectly indicate the indefinite escaping of presence that is actively at work within and around us is the glow from, the gaze upon the smartphone. These days felt as extensions of self, they nevertheless hide within themselves references to forces still darker, forces yet to be fully measured, in the wash of contents a click away, in the chemical-economic roots of its production, in the governmental tracking and collecting swimming just below its operational surface. Not only is it the now-ever-present companion in our swirling movement toward and away from love, it itself is the encapsulation and embodiment of the ambivalence diffused within our own selves, reflected on the margins of the messages and posts from our beloveds, its own processing shot through and through with lines of flight or fight, themselves not yet taken, but not altogether absent either. To live at the opening of this century is for both the eye askance and the device’s screen to have their displays filled out not just semi-emptily with a wariness in the face of (worries about, experiences of) failures of intimacy, but saturatedly, daily, concretely, all-too-vividly – and not just by scenes imprinted with the presence and absence of our local companions in being alone, but by largely hidden collective, structural, world-historical powers, half-demonic even if in no small part of our own making. It is at this point that the subtle steady power in Wnuk’s work digs in, not yet abandoned of hope that, despite all of its circumscription, despite the inescapable ambiguities on all of these fronts, there lies strength yet, in being here with you.
Clinton Tolley is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UC San Diego.