Emilie Chaix Collages, Dessins, Drawings, Sculptures

Emilie Chaix, expanding visual esthetics

Emilie Chaix uses classical materials and techniques to add ordinary organic shapes, forms and textures to foreground raw or biological forms – say, the deep red twist of a heart muscle, the wet line of an internal organ, the rounding asymmetry of a marine polyp – and including the discarded (literally, disregarded) parts of everyday shapes and forms – say, the stem of a rose, a chicken’s head, spider-web silk. Essentially, Chaix’s work invites the onlooker to expand the range of what she enables herself to “see” in forms, images and textures. This “expansion by inclusion” is not meant to challenge convention but to enable us to appreciate a broader range of the world around us as “beautiful”. In this, Chaix’s approach is much bolder, but still analogous to, for example, Jorinde Voigt’s counter-intuitive presentation of strong pastels and affirmed line to “mathematize” – legitimize the visual esthetic of – “amorphous” forms. Defining “gender” is mostly a story of visual esthetics, so it provides a good everyday example for what is going on in Chaix’s expansion of the visual esthetic through inclusion of what is “seeable” in form, imagery and texture. Conventional visual esthetic is generally founded on a notion […]