Elene Chantladze

Elene Chantladze’s drawings and paintings inhabit a dual space, grounded in ordinary stuff of everyday life as well as reflecting a highly subjective representation of lived experience. Her approach to image-making is layered, accreted with meaning through both the materials she uses and how she synthesizes personal history, literature, local custom, and global events into her fantastic tableaux. The range of media she employs — from traditional paint and charcoal to more unconventional materials like kerosene and berry juice, as well as natural elements such as stone and manmade detritus including paper plates and plastic lids — not only speaks to the primary relationship of Chantladze’s being in the world, but also to the deep compulsion of the artist to create something from anything. Equally inspired by the surface differentiations on a rock found by the riverbank as in the stains and marks on the discarded scraps on which she draws and paints, her quasi-fairytale compositions engage with vertiginous simultaneity, idiosyncratic figuration, and surreal narrativity. In her work, there is a porosity of being, children roam fields of flowers in which their own faces peer back at them, animals approach as friends and hover as protecting spirits over landscapes rife with foliage, lovers can be star-crossed and bridegrooms monstrous. However, any perception of faux-naif sensibility belies a complex reparative impulse for portraying worlds in whose making Chantladze recenters her vision and subject position within a culture that has traditionally allowed for this kind of creative labor and selftaught practice to remain invisible.