In her current body of work In dreams I wake slips into TANYA CHAITOW’s world of romantic landscapes and chimeric beings. Ambiguity and whimsy are important elements in CHAITOW’s works. Her fanciful paintings blur past and present, fact and fictions, internal and external reality. Adopting a naïve style, she is able to work intuitively to capture fleeting mental states and her poetic works are charged with a powerful psychological resonance. These romantic, almost ‘fairy tale’ depictions have the surreal quality of dreams; where they don’t quite make sense. However, it is through embracing dreams and these dreamlike qualities in her art that the artist feels most attuned to her sense of self.
As with her Family Matters series, this body of work continues with themes and depictions of familial human relationships. However, the subjects of CHAITOW’s paintings are not altogether human. Ghostly figures; swarms of bees that take on corporeal human formations; and anthropomorphised characters that embody an amalgam of human, plant and animal parts, populate her paintings. While her works often blur the distinctions between human, animal and the plants, CHAITOW identifies personally with this imagery; describing them as self-portraits. She associates animals with representation of, and kinship with the human psyche: particularly her own. There is an interrelatedness between the human and animal self she depicts. Here, CHAITOW offers up a vision of her personal mythologies. Like a playwright she enlists us in imaginary worlds where we are free to reflect and fantasise.
Uncanny depictions of historic genre paintings lend themselves to this dreamlike amalgam of the familiar made strange. CHAITOW works from the old masters, such as Goya, Gainsborough, de Hooch, and Vermeer. Goya in particular is a source of these works, after having had the opportunity to work directly from his paintings in the Prado museum. Her troupe of impossible characters take the places of the original figures and subjects in their iconic settings. CHAITOW creates a series of works where the same Gainsborough or Goya painting is recreated in multiple; with differing and eerie results. In each rendition something in the composition, setting or characters has gone awry. Heads burst into a flourish of foliage and flowers; figures are swarmed with butterflies and bees; human heads are transfigured with bird and animal features; while some figures seem to disappear from the composition altogether or become no more than ghostly apparitions. Portraits of regal gentlemen and women are rendered faceless and featureless amidst the throng of CHAITOW’s dreamlike devices: their egos succumbing to her surreal reformations. These delicately reimagined vignettes entwine history with CHAITOW’s signature floral motifs, symbolisms and whimsical characters to marvellous effect.
Ainsley Wilcock
