ALEXIS DE CHAUNAC
Saturn Devouring His Son [Testimonio, 1798], 2018
ADC158
MALA SANGRE | BESTIARIO
ALEXIS DE CHAUNAC
Pinacoteca Diego Rivera, Xalapa, Mexico
May 7 - June 28, 2015
MALA SANGRE
ALEXIS DE CHAUNAC
curated by: Gloria Maldonado Ansó
25 September - 7 December 2014
Instituto Cultural de León y la Coordinación de Artes Visuales, León, Guanajuato, México
MALA SANGRE | ALEXIS DE CHAUNAC
Solo Exhibition at El Museo Iconografico del Quijote. Guanajuato, Mexico
17 June - 31 July 2014
50 works were presented
Mummies of Guanajuato
Mummy of Guanajuato 1
Mummy of Guanajuato 2
Mummy of Guanajuato 3
2013
paint stick and charcoal on handmade paper
30 x 22.5 inches
"These series of paint stick drawings are based on the Mummies of Guanajuato, naturally mummified bodies entombed in the local cemetery of Guanajuato, Mexico during the cholera outburst in 1833. During that time a local tax was imposed requiring relatives to pay an annual fee to keep their relatives buried. If the fee was not paid, the body was exhumed. In 1865 the first mummified body was extracted in a preserved condition due to the characteristics of the soil in which they rested and the area’s very dry climate. A law prohibiting disinterring was passed in 1958, but a museum still exhibits the original mummies. Many of the bodies were buried immediately to control the spread of the epidemic and in some cases, the dying were buried alive by accident. As a result, some of the mummies have horrific expressions attesting to their death in the tombs. They look like the preliminary stages of sculptures: the wire frame, the first tendons of clay, the thin glaze of skin, their clenched hands over their shriveled bosoms, their wide jaws, their tongues out, their nostrils flared. Their actions have been frozen in time as they face death for eternity in perpetual screaming. Drawing the mummies was an opportunity for me to further work with line, form, texture and tone."
KYLE KOURY on LOS CAPRICHOS
Alexis de Chaunac’s Los Caprichos are confounding. They disturb me while luring me in. I discover a trace of a figure and follow it, seeking a resolve. But just as soon as I’ve apprehended the figure’s apparent autonomy, it dissolves into the strange pool that makes up the dizzying whole, and I am taken by the nearly abstract festival of wild shapes and rich color. But then the image transforms again, because despite the constant lure of abstraction, the drawings are portraits too. They are portraits of sufferersmen wrapped up in a spectacle of their many forms, prisoners in a web/puzzle of pictorial, poetic chaos. This is a perplexing duality that beckons a two‐faced viewer. I am at once sympathetic of the sufferer his eyes are sad and human and drawn to his pain; which, elucidated so beautifully in the complex construction of the body, is sexy, intoxicating, and gives me intense pleasure. Thus, I need the figure to tear him apart, and I tear him apart to appreciate his pain. Abstraction and figuration are endlessly entwined, showing the viewer agony whilst inculcating him with joy this is the power of Alexis’s Los Caprichos.
LOS CAPRICHOS
ALL WILL FALL
2012
Color ink on paper
10 x 7 in. (25.4 x 17.8 cm.)
2012
Color ink on paper
10 x 7 in. (25.4 x 17.8 cm.)2012
Color ink on paper
10 x 7 in. (25.4 x 17.8 cm.)2012
Color ink on paper
7 x 10 in. ( 17.8 x 25.4 cm)2012
Color ink on paper
10 x 7 in. (25.4 x 17.8 cm.)LOS CAPRICHOS,
THOSE SPECKS OF DUST
2012
Color ink on paper
10 x 7 in. (25.4 x 17.8 cm.)
The Infant Redeemer
2013
Ink and gouache on brown paper in white box frame
81 x 35 in. (205.7 x 88.9 cm.)
SAINTS
RASPUTIN AND PRNCESS ALEXANDRA
2013
Ink wash and watercolor on paper
26 x 40 in. (66 x 101.6 cm.)
Prices and availability are located on ARTSY - follow our link located in CONTACT
2013
Ink, wash and watercolour on paper
40 x 26 in. (101.6 x 66 cm)Alexis de Chaunac
Head II, 2013
Paint stick and graphite on paper
18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61 cm)
Prices are on ARTSY - follow our link located on CONTACT
Alexis de Chaunac
photographed by Adolfo Doring June 2014
© Adolfo Doring all rights reserved
Alexis de Chaunac in his studio
(French-Mexican, b. 1991 in New York, NY, lives and works in New York)
As a rapidly up-and-coming artist, Alexis de Chaunac draws from Nature, literature, religion, mythology, art history, politics, and his own multicultural background to produce exuberant, mixed-media drawings. He describes drawing as “a transcendental language that anyone can understand”. He works quickly, often with ink because of its fluidity, producing rich, multilayered works filled with faces and laden with cultural references. De Chaunac draws inspiration from such diverse artists as Rembrandt, Goya, Delacroix, Schiele, Picasso, and Francis Bacon, whom he groups together as “chroniclers of the human condition”. His own artistic rendering of humanity comes from literature. He claims influences from the Scriptures to great epics and all the way to Beat Generation writers such as William S. Burrough. Referring to his practice as contemporary myth making, he takes archetypes such as Oedipus, Jesus Christ or Dante “working out of them to explore the primitive aspects of human nature”. Recognizing that art and the sacred have always been connected since both question death and challenge the passage of time.
Born in New York and raised in Mexico City and Paris, he grew up drawing in the studio of his grandfather – renowned Mexican artist Jose Luis Cuevas. He then came to the US to study at the Sarah Lawrence College, NY. He shows with Silas von Morisse Gallery in New York, NY and already has had his first museum solo exhibition at the Museo Iconografico del Quijote, Guanajuato, Mexico (2014) and The Pinacoteca Diego Rivera (2015).
see attached pdf for exhibitions and bibliography:
