303 Gallery is pleased to present Unravel, an exhibition of paintings by Charlotte Fox in the gallery’s Project Room.
In a new suite of works, Fox extends her investigation of desire, repulsion, and the unstable theater of the body. These works live at the interstices of seduction and estrangement, ecstasy and unease. Immediate in their sensitively, sensuously rendered corporeality, the paintings resist fixed interpretation by way of cunning formal interventions. They are ciphers, directing the viewer towards private mythologies and half-articulated longings in a highly allusive painterly language. At once enchanting and hostile, each tableaux overwhelms with a cloying yet mysterious tactility, arousing in the viewer surprising, conflicting somatic impressions.
Drawing from references across time and discipline, Fox assumes the role of an unreliable narrator, collapsing dimensional and thematic boundaries to produce singular, hallucinatory images. As figures intertwine and fuse, physical boundaries dissolve and identities disintegrate. The artist captures moments of suspension; bodies stuck between escape and surrender, connection and disconnection, and transposes it to the canvas. From there she engages in a defamiliarizing process of layering and warping, abstracting the subjects from their origins and purpose, confronting us with the mystery of intimacy, the impossibility of knowing the self and the other. Fox’s paintings bump up against the limits of our comprehension.
Across the canvases, bodies idle and writhe, in states of searching lust and dissociative repose. Sleek and blanched, the figures resemble specters. Variously truncated, overlaid in neon hues, in flagrante delicto, they approach the stuff of nightmares. Fox plays the dream-weaver, and her canvases adhere to a dream logic in which time and space undergo exaggerations and distortions at the artist’s deft hand. This tension between idealized form and material vulnerability, eroticism and decay, animates Fox’s practice. Each orgiastic scene attracts and repels, enlisting its beholder as both voyeur and participant in a delirious spectacle of longing, abjection, and catharsis.
Charlotte Fox (b. 1994, New York City) received her BFA in 2016 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus in painting. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in recent years at As It Stands, Los Angeles; Moosey Art Hoxton, London; H.G. Chicago, Chicago; 303 Gallery, New York; Reena Spaulings Fine Art Gallery, New York; Onground Gallery, Seoul; and Hoxton Arches, London; and online with kennyschachter.art. She currently lives and works in New York.