Louis-Pierre Lachapelle

May 30 - July 20, 2024
Opening Reception: Thurs. May 30, 5 - 7pm

About The Show

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While creating something very intimate, I want the viewer to experience and find their own voyage in the work. Returning to the foundations of painting gave me the chance to engage in a dynamic visual dialogue through a variety of materials and media. Investigating the “highs” in contrasts, textures, lines, drawings and photo transfers, I am in search of lows – as in grounding - in these unsettling aerial environments.

The duende wounds. In the healing of that wound, which never closes, lie the strange, invented qualities of a man’s work…
- Federico Garcia Lorca

Cove Street Arts is proud to debut emerging Maine artist Louis Pierre Lachapelle's powerful and enigmatic new body of work, Gravité. This series of mixed media paintings is notable for its rawness and immediacy, for its unflinching authenticity, and for its visceral impact. It fairly throbs with the intensity of exploding boundaries, between beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, chaos and control, rationality and irrationality. Lachapelle's goal of making work that is original, very intimate to him, and yet universal — in its emotional terrain, and in our shared and very human need for grounding — is achieved.

The work is achingly gorgeous, and complicated. Its beauty ravished by a brush with something dissonant, painful, and profound. In other words, it has duende. In Lorca's aesthetics, the duende is conceived as an ancient and demonic earth spirit who must be awaken[ed] in the remotest mansions of the blood, and with whom an artist must wrestle at the rim of the wound....But there are neither maps nor exercises to help us....We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, that he leans on human pain with no consolation and makes Goya (master of the grays, silvers, and pinks of the best English painting) work with his fists and knees in horrible bitumens.

Lachapelle's paintings seem not only to embody the spirit of a scuffle with a Lorcan duende but, at times, to represent it. The metaphorical sense of a human body in situations where "death is possible" is present in the artist's frequent use of a "blood and guts" palette and in the "violent" poetics of his mark making, with its prevalence of splatters, drips, and dramatic, gestural brushwork. Lachapelle's personal body is also present, though often spectrally, in collaged photographic transfers of images taken by his collaborator, Erin Little. Duende itself is also allowed a certain corporality in the artist's use of materials. The earth and its elements are made manifest through brown and metallic hues and in the coarse textures or unrefined qualities of some incorporated materials. Especially, perhaps, in the primeval symbolism of thick smears of a crude, tarry material smeared atop the fragility of translucent washes of peach and blood red. Horrible bitumens indeed...