Chantal Mahoney

About me:

To see the African patterned bodies celebrating the rituals of life is to witness one of the world’s oldest and most beautiful art form. When we travel around the world and meet other cultures, we learn that they are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth. The social world that we know doesn’t exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular lineage made many generations ago. The sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations, brought into being by the human consciousness is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all we are and have created. The tribal notion of Beauty differs from a western concept. For African, Beauty shouldn’t only correspond to tribal artistic rules and concepts, but it should also have the ability to cure, to place curses, to instruct and indeed to protect. Tribal people draw their identity and strength, their powerful sense of being, from their surroundings. Their very survival depends on their ability to anticipate every nuance of the seasons, every movement of the animal, the very sound that plants make as they grow. They regard the human body as the best possible canvas, and the use of natural elements is a testimony to the profound way that nature shapes the existence and empowers the creativity of these people. Ochre and clays, orchid and other fibers, canes, grasses, aromatic plant and flowers, seeds, shells and birds plumes, the material world is appropriated and the elements of the earth are made animate. To see the spectacular aesthetics of tribal art, displayed with such boundless flair and creativity, is to witness a special alchemy Their language of adornments has a vocabulary that conveys messages, proclaim status and express feelings, moods and intentions. This ability to transform adversity into inspiration, coupled with the sure knowledge of their role in the community, gives individuals the sense of place and strength of being. The myriad of cultures of the world are unique expressions of imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: What doest it mean to be human and alive? When asked this question, these cultures respond in 7000 different voices. The world can only appear monochromatic for those who interpret it from their own single culture. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit. "Art is a lie,” insisted Degas, “the air you breathe in a picture in not the same thing as the air you breathe outside.” As restlessly independent and experimental an artist as I am, I ground my achievements in French modernism. I remain a traditionalist in my methods, a “follower”, working selectively, composing my pictures from drawings. Again and again, aspects of my work present themselves as a transformation of some aspect of the tradition, aspect that I try to understand deeply, to be able to dismantle it, split it from its context, and reconstructing it, infuse it with meaning and freshness. Artists often feel alone, perhaps cocky and yet unsure of themselves at the same time, but ultimately are trying to an impression, to make their mark. Here are drawings where the diligent observation of nature and of the human form can somehow never be exhausted in its ongoing quest. The searching, inventive attacks on the ancient problem of capturing (or posing) the figure, and figure’s relationship to architecture and furniture and draperies suggest a discipline worthy of Degas. But the incontrovertible attribute of the work is its deep and complex yearning for idyllic human empathy and desire, an expression of “luxe et volupté”, the command of a language of psychological even narrative sensuality. I am ultimately searching for a sort of verisimilitude of mood, or of deeper emotion. Attitude is everything – attitude of physiognomy or posture, of the feeling of the moment shared by viewer and subject. The works then exist as complete emotional pockets of being. I apply intellectual rigor to my art, yet these figure drawings and paintings seem unguarded glimpses into my private world. Each time I move the pen, charcoal or brush across the page, I take a risk, setting out in quest of the unknown. “Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion” says Diebenkorn. Mistakes are made, lines are erased, and their history remains faded reminders that a struggle took place on the page or the canvas. The gesture of turning to the other, of inventing a movement with another whom you do not know and cannot anticipate, is a gesture attentive to a silence in which you are exposed as a body in motion. My language is what I reveal to you in the intimacy of the work, a language that introduces you to a movement I call my own, that invites you to respond to a direction I initiate. Dance operates as a metaphore for the distances we place between self and other, through which we attempt to delineate a different way of facing the other, a different way of belonging in the world. The gesture is a moment in language that is not exhausted in communication, it exceeds language, exposing communication incommunicability, capturing language in moments of silence, expressing the muteness inherent in humankind’s very capacity of language. More than a style, more than a manner, of fingers or hands, we find here a movement of the body, a syntax that calculates without calculating, to encounter things, to be in the world, and to touch it without touching it. 'Life is a play and we all play a part - The Lover, the Dreamer, the Clown - The Dreamer and Lover are always in tears - The Clown spreads sunshine around - The life with a smile is the life worthwhile - The Clown till the curtain comes down - Even though you're only make believing - Laugh, Clown, laugh! - Even though something inside is grieving - Laugh, Clown, laugh! - Paint a lot of smiles around your face - And laugh, Clown, laugh!’ Although the theme is about the Tango dance, the paintings are more about a man and woman in search of each other. It is a search for an embrace, a way to be together. For the fact is that the tango is not just a dance. In its purest form it’s a sensual coupling, forged by raw emotion, two figures mutually dependent and interactive throughout the dance. The tango is always intense, passionate and sensual, and there is the consistent desire in the work to take intrinsically private moments and make them public. Paintings are active carriers of meaning, and genre paintings are always questioning life, with its social confusion and shifting values. The paintings are about exactly that ambivalence. We regard the protagonists at a distance across deep and activated spaces, diagonally oriented, asymmetrical, with fragmented forms and spaces, and always nervous energy carried by the brush marks or the vivid colours. The world is a solid element that swirls, rises, falls: the world is the music. And the dancers are a continuous substance with it.