About the Artist: Carmen Chaparro

Carmen Chaparro's paintings all stem from ideas and notions of a perversion in paradise. The pool and tropical vegetation persists in all the work and act as signifiers of paradise. The paintings are focused on image and iconography, often time blurring out evidence of the hand and brush stroke to achieve this. Figures and objects masquerading as figures lay vulnerable in places of relaxation while the environment created within the confines of the painting pushes down, punctures and obscure the subject.

As an adult looking back on a childhood spent in south Florida the paintings are made from the perspective of a viewer through a lens of nostalgia and have a healthy injection of comedy, kitsch and whimsy. The paintings come together systematically. Layers and textures are laid down to create multi-dimensional spaces within a flat context.

Carmen Chaparro holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.