Monster mash …
In this 2018 work, the young Los Angeleno painter Christina Quarles confronts us with a confusion of bodies and painterly techniques. Is that a buttock, a penis or a breast anchoring our attention at the centre of the canvas? Surface skin gives way to interior muscle and bone.
Different strokes …
Her methods are pointedly mixed up: depthless swirls resembling graffiti spray are the flat plane against which figures cavort, rendered with a mix of thick cartoonish lines and expressive texture.
Inside out …
Faces blur, lost in their own ecstasy. There is also a sense that, rather than bodies seen from the outside, this is what our bodies, sexuality and sexual experience feel like from the inside.
Chop and change …
Not everything is fluid, though. Figures bump up against the picture’s boundaries and are cut through and dissected by intrusive planes. It’s a sexy, slick vision of the clash between the personal desires and external forces that shape who we are.
Included in Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, Whitechapel Gallery, E1, to 10 May
