Nicole Charbonnet - Avatars & Heroes

Nicole Charbonnet's upcoming exhibition will feature mixed media paintings of American cultural icons. Whether her subjects are super heroes, housewives or cowboys Nicole captures and distorts many of the figures that have long served as a personification of America's attitudes and ideals. Nicole's discerning representations bring into question both the relevancy and truth behind all they embody.

Nicole Charbonnet uses stereotypical images representative of America as a way of exploring our past and present perceptions of ourselves and others, as well as our identity as members of a society, and as citizens of a country that now seems to be in transition of redefining its values and agendas. Many of her works take images from our cultural landscape, especially Westerns and American film noir, and re-shapes the images. She sees in her process of "erasing" the paint and overlaying additional layers something that both celebrates and criticizes the values portrayed by her subjects. “I'm raising questions about their current viability in a changed world. I make them look old and tired, though still beautiful, to ask if it's time to relegate them to memory."

As a result of her unique painting technique Nicole Charbonnet's paintings offer a palimpsest of images that hint at past memories built up over time. She credits her native city New Orleans for giving her a heightened sense of the lingering effects of history. “If you watch New Orleans, you see everywhere the effects of the process of time on surfaces,” she says, adding “That's true of every place, every person.” Exploring the ways we remember, both individually and collectively, and the ways we forget, she starts each work by memory, often an image that has existed in the culture of other paintings, on film, and in nature, for example. She then sands the paint down, forcing the memory of the initial image to fade beneath other pictures and words constructed from layers of collaged newsprint, posters, wallpaper samples, children's storybooks and such. All these lurk above and below layers of pigment, gesso, cement, and sculpting paste. Charbonnet's paintings are very textural and built up over long periods of time. The superimposition of textures, images, words, loose watery washes of paint and veils of translucent fabric or paper, creates a visual threshold in her work which is something to look at as well as to look through. These surfaces retain or reveal a “memory” of preexisting stages or structures. The result is a work in which some images, colors, and textures are obfuscated, while others remain visible, however shaped or shaded by previous or subsequent gestures, images or events. As Charbonnet says, “Nothing is ever completely gone, so even if you don't hold a conscious memory of something, it forms the fabric and texture of who you are. I try to re-create the process your mind goes through in becoming what it is. You see something, and it reminds you of something else, another context, another feeling, even while the original image remains.” In this act the artist reveals less about herself and more about the process of making art.