The secret ingredient è la morte
MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to announce Shannon Cartier Lucy’s debut exhibition in Italy The secret ingredient è la morte opening in Milan at Casa Corbellini-Wassermann on May 19th, 2022.
The exhibition premieres a new series of paintings addressing the artist’s fascination for ancient Italian iconography and classical heritage, elaborating on the aesthetic language of Early Renaissance Italian master painting such as Beato Angelico and Giotto, as well as incorporating Flemish painters’ tradition.
With a career bustling experimentation spanning over twenty years, Shannon Cartier Lucy’s paintings are a prologue to endless, inspired storytelling. At first glance, Cartier Lucy’s subjects appear both familiar and evocative: a woman dressed in black holding a flower, a girl with a duck on a leash, and vegetables arranged in still life compositions; they channel deep, personal narratives. The artist finds inspiration in Robert Bresson and Michael Haneke’s movie production, balancing the duality of dark themes and intriguing narratives, beauty and darkness, the ordinary and the absurd, comfort and discomfort, irony and distrust.
Cartier Lucy instills her painting with eerie, surreal situations infusing her compositions with a uniquely enigmatic naiveté: “my paintings are each a sort of a self-portrait. I like to portray my truth. I feel like I can only be completely honest if I'm speaking from my point of view. I'm not ready to speak for anyone but myself” she explains.
Cartier Lucy is a cantor of the subtle absurdity of ordinary life; her practice can be seen as a deep dive into dreamlike visions, unfolding through a mixed vocabulary of sacred and profane references filled with hallucinatory and provocative hints.
The stories she tells through her paintings aspire to amplify painterly tradition and its tropes – by challenging the format of still life and portraiture and by developing an open time machine that shatters the barriers between the past and future, convention and innovation.
The Artist
Shannon Cartier Lucy was born in 1977, in Nashville, Tennessee, where she currently lives and works.
With a career of endless experimentation spanning over twenty years, Shannon Cartier Lucy is one of the most celebrated figurative painters working today.
Raised in an unconventional context with a schizophrenic father, Cartier Lucy paints seemingly ordinary and familiar scenes in a realistic style that also appear alienating for their surreal details, poses and composition.
Through her paintings, Shannon Cartier Lucy explores the concept of body and expresses the clear and melancholic domestic reality and its feeling of solitude and nostalgia; the bodies are faceless and their actions are set in situations violent and intriguing at the same time. What appears familiar transforms to become the lead to another level of narrative, suggesting confusion of information.
Cartier Lucy infuses her painting with uncanny and impossible situations that become a new normality in her work. The artist is a cantor of the inner world; her practice can be seen as a mirror of a dystopic society, whether intentional or accidental, reflecting a sociocultural landscape filled with hallucinatory and contradictory information.