Issy Wood, a young rising star of British painting 1, has her first French exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations. Spread over 60 paintings and as many personal anecdotes, like a visual diary, this plunge into intimacy, mixing kitsch and triviality, speaks volumes about the stereotypes of our society.
High-gloss black leather coats, car seats and dental fillings painted in close-up; glittering tin cans, porcelain and silver dishes; velvet-painted armor and skin jackets to stunning visual effect...
Issy Wood's painting is as striking for its meticulous, almost tactile quality as for the diversity of motifs she combines in devices often evoking split screens. "I see the paintings on a double velvet panel as 'love dates'," she writes on the cartel of a 2021 oil on velvet entitled Steed energy (L'Énergie de la monture), adding to her point: "Here the femininity associated with the cowhide jacket and the machismo associated with the knight's breastplate blur. The subtle entanglement of armor and the violence implicit in the act of wearing an animal's skin make us question who's wearing what."
© Courtesy of the artist, Carlos Ishikawa, London and Michael Werner, New York / Photo: Damian Griffiths
Issy Wood, a young rising star of British painting 1, has her first French exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations. Spread over 60 paintings and as many personal anecdotes, like a visual diary, this plunge into intimacy, mixing kitsch and triviality, speaks volumes about the stereotypes of our society.
High-gloss black leather coats, car seats and dental fillings painted in close-up; glittering tin cans, porcelain and silver dishes; velvet-painted armor and skin jackets to stunning visual effect...
Issy Wood's painting is as striking for its meticulous, almost tactile quality as for the diversity of motifs she combines in devices often evoking split screens. "I see the paintings on a double velvet panel as 'love dates'," she writes on the cartel of a 2021 oil on velvet entitled Steed energy (L'Énergie de la monture), adding to her point: "Here the femininity associated with the cowhide jacket and the machismo associated with the knight's breastplate blur. The subtle entanglement of armor and the violence implicit in the act of wearing an animal's skin make us question who's wearing what."
© Courtesy of the artist, Carlos Ishikawa, London and Michael Werner
New York / Photo: Damian Griffiths
SELFIES AND PHOTO DUMPING
Hence these impressive series of monumental canvases depicting the collection of sauce boats, soup tureens, plates and other porcelain inherited from his grandmother. Here we find the very contemporary taste for hyperrealism (here devoted to decoy), but even more so something morbid and very obsessive. "Personal fads" or "contemporary fetishes"? Guillaume Houzé 2 writes in the preface to the catalog that the London-based artist "delves into the intimate to reveal what lies beneath the reputedly conventional codes of society. He adds: "Behind seemingly banal, innocent and precious objects, Issy Wood depicts the violence of domestic space and the passage of time [in] so many vanities [...] alternately ironic and grating."
In his paintings of clocks and selfies, for example, the artist doesn't hesitate to abuse his own image. Playing on virilist stereotypes through ultra-sexualized motifs (leather jackets, gleaming car interiors...), Issy Wood also attacks feminine clichés.
1 Born in 1993 and trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the artist also writes and composes music.
2 Chairman of the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation.
"ISSY WOOD. STUDY FOR NO"
LAFAYETTE ANTICIPATIONS
9, RUE DU PLÂTRE, PARIS 4E
UNTIL JANUARY 7, 2024
LAFAYETTEANTICIPATIONS.COM
