Chloe Saï Breil-Dupont

The mysterious portraiture of Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont comprises the interpersonal interactions with her sitters that disclose the multidimensionality of being. In her practice, Breil-Dupont focuses on the core ideas of time, questioning its linearity and logic. Her sitters are mostly her friends who, through the process of posing, become multifaceted individuals whose personal history shifts inspired by the dialogues and anecdotes of one another. She explains: “We do not exist in the same way with another person, and then with another, or yet another.” Her work investigates the human condition and explores the effects interactions have on our identities, navigating through the versatility of time. Breil-Dupont seizes certain stylistic features specific to Flemish and Renaissance portraiture to convey a pictorial language wholly new and radical. In her portraits, she examines identity through a distortion lens, rendering her sitters to serve more than mere character resemblance —a new kind of representation where everything happens at once. By looking into notions of existentialism, her paintings rather compose a sensitive archive of the experiences that seem to encompass everything her sitters, and by extension we, go through as human beings. ...