Chiara Enzo’s meticulous, small-scale paintings capture fragmented bodies in haunting and unvarnished detail. Enlarged patches of bumped, nicked, and freckled skin, fuzzy napes of necks, taut ribcages, and soft bellies engraved with the impressions of tight clothing are made strange and unrecognisable. Derived both from life and from images culled from magazines, social media, and historical medical books and rendered in dense, textured marks, their surfaces appear charged and tangible, evoking surface, texture, warmth, and touch. As Enzo has said, our skin is our surface, our casing, our most immediate site of stimulation and pain; it is also our limit and boundary, the physical space where our interaction with the world begins and ends. Enzo has conceived of the present installation of more than twenty works as a total environment, titled Conversation Piece. The paintings’ small scale, in combination with their spatialised presentation, invites the viewer to experience them intimately close-up, yet as part of a greater ensemble. Insomuch as Enzo’s sensitive attention to the figure can feel tender and personal, seen from such extreme vantage points, it is also deeply ambiguous, or even menacing. Offered to the viewer for consumption, skin as seen up-close looks as delicate as a piece of fruit.
Madeline Weisburg
