Join us on Thursday 15 October for a walkthrough with the artist from 5pm. Private View 6-8pm.

Josh Lilley is pleased to present How We're Doing, the third solo exhibition by Celeste Rapone (b. 1985, NJ, USA) with the gallery.

Educated and living in Chicago but born and raised in New Jersey, Rapone’s paintings are imbued with the formal sophistication of a former Art Institute lecturer and the sensitive observation of a family member and a spouse.

Her daily drive to challenge her technical capacity entails no preparatory drawing or sitters- each painting is an opportunity to explore and learn, discovering the purpose of the picture and the characters of the protagonists within it spontaneously. Behind that process of acute variation rests the years of humble repetition and solitude inherent to a committed, daily practitioner; the studio pilgrimages, the perpetual reaching for the blurry purpose of one’s work. It is through that rigour that Rapone achieves a deep honesty to her painting, where the borders of her compositions and the boundaries of her relationships are aligned. She brings an unsentimental dignity to her contorted bodies and on the characters who animate them.

For the first time in a series, Rapone’s porous studio walls have let men in and they are duly taking up space. Whether barriers or frames, foils or muses, these male figures contain a wry inventory of highly descriptive, local accuracies. From spread limbs and fleshy hand placements to earnest embraces and detached stares, each choice denotes the body language of relationship dynamics, the mileage of time spent in another’s company.

Each couple is a clenched and coiled clump of shape and mass. Rapone depicts them as barely distinct from their environment, their physiological distortions intertwined with the architecture of their setting. Their various scenes of domestic negotiation mirror the artist’s own exertions to resolve the arrangements of bodies and surfaces, objects and space. Beguiling in their posture and questioning in their gaze, Rapone’s entangled couples summon echoes of our own moments of intimacy and isolation.

A text below by Louisa Elderton accompanies the show.

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I hope these paintings find you well…

You know those memes that begin ‘Hope this email finds you well…’, followed by an image in which someone is either working from bed hungover to hell wearing cute sunglasses, or incarnate as a child sobbing at a desk with a crumbling crayon, or a greasy goggle-eyed mollusc, pupils dilated, receding into its shell’s shadow? That’s more or less how Celeste Rapone’s paintings found me. Seven days into a break up, in sweet and salty glory. Because of course it’s both – isn’t it? – when weighing up the good, the bad and the in-betweens of any relationship. Done. Dusted. Fucked but fucking hyped. And beneath the sodden tissues doubling as a duvet, you’re there, reclining as that very same mollusc, but you’re naked and nasty and – that’s right – hot.

I say this not to be provocative, but rather, because below the sorrow of separating one life from another, inevitably there is also a certain freedom to be found. A shift into something different, gloriously anew. The relinquishment of another’s weight. An exit from the matrix made together. The maelstrom. And not in some laboured red pill vs. blue pill way with its attendant manosphere mess, but in the simple sense that you no longer have to make space for that someone.

Rapone’s new suite of paintings (How We’re Doing) almost exclusively depicts couples. Heterosexual couples. And it’s crowded in there. When I speak to the artist, she says, “for me, this show really started more as a kind of curiosity: how would my female subjects change in the presence of men?” Yet as I spend time with these paintings, gender does not seem to be the point at all. Intimacy is. And connection, or rather, disconnection. Despondency. Discombobulation. All the goddamn ds.

The couples in Rapone’s paintings practically melt into each other (Hug); amalgamate as their own statuesque form, bathed in butterscotch light (Night In); fuse as a mass of sickly pink flesh, one nose dripping into another (Sick Kiss). So why are they also so alone? This is the latent question on the lips of Rapone’s subjects, silenced by clipped tongues.

The limbs of these figures are elongated, enlarged, entangled. Awkward. They encroach upon one another to fill the canvas entirely. The sheer size of the enormous bodies makes their worlds (the universe of the picture plane) seem small and suffocating. Congested. They bend themselves into uncomfortable shapes, accommodating the mass of the other. They stare. The softness of skin and flesh and fat sinks under the weight of gravity; pooling, relenting. Inflated, engorged hands bind and clasp and grasp and hold and grab and pray and melt and prod at one another. Lonely. Detached.

Perhaps I am projecting. But you can see it too, right? Just look at the melancholy blue of Bedroom Scene, in which a greying woman reaches out to a sleeping man, his back turned. A wristwatch frames his giant hand, marking time. She kneels at his bedside, sadness swelling. Chin collapsing into breasts sagging into bellybutton fingered by red nails that claw up her zipper. Not tonight. The offering of a giant rose tattooed upon her thigh bulges from threadbare jeans. She tries to contain herself so that it doesn’t all spill out, holding her desolation behind a curtain carving the canvas in two. Beneath her is the stark quadrilateral of a slate grey rug scattered with detritus: hair clip, comb, boxer shorts, tangled knickers, Sony PlayStation. A non-slip mat peeks out from under the rug ­­– a ghostly double. But it is slipping. It has already slipped.

Rapone tells me how, “with this show I was thinking about the early post-Depression era – American Modernists like Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe. That crop of painters who were painting with the same pent-up anxiety as the social realists who were in tandem with them. It came through in the mark-making, in the rigour of paint and palette.”

She never makes preparatory sketches, choosing instead to work immediately onto her canvases, where “everything gets flushed out”. The paintings in How We’re Doing interweave two narratives: one is shaped by the figures themselves and the other by the miscellaneous objects dispersed haphazardly through the compositions. Rapone says of these, “I really like to reference the everyday in my work, but here I’m also interested in the symbolism and iconography in Gertrude Abercrombie’s work; the descriptors of the relationship and the psychology is found more in the detritus than in the actual bodies themselves.”

These objects tell their own stories. In Settlers, we see a tiny Italian flag embedded in the grass; a spider scuttling along the man’s hand; a crumpled Doritos packet; a candyfloss pink thermos; a comically long yellow telescope, buckling at awkward angles. A reclining couple rests upon a pasty green paisley cloth. It is night time. The man’s hands are gigantic and Gustonesque, with fingers bound and broken, poking at her chest. They are nearly naked, capped with comical camping hats, yet despite being an entangled corpus of pink and greening flesh, they are neither at one with nature nor one another; in fact, they seem faintly ridiculous, absurd, gazing at their own navels rather than at the stars. Sticks have been stacked for a bonfire that remains unlit.

In closing, I am struck by the two lone portraits that depict a man and woman respectively:

She, Damper: desperate amid a mane of black hair that sticks to her grey body, spat out by storm clouds. She is entangled by dark ropes of her own making. An anaemic peace lily droops under a tattoo of magic-eight ball cherries, ripe for the picking. Her hands are also cherry pink and wanton, pleading with fingers that are a broken mangled mess.

He, Sentimentalist: adrift behind a flue of cigarette smoke, searching in a black void. A thorned flower wilts in his clubbed hand. He strains to hear out of a mottled pink Van Gogh-like ear; it is its own object, monstrously fleshy and strangely formed, reminiscent of a wrinkled foetus curled beneath the man’s little limp red beret.

Each searches out the other. Seemingly to no end.