Chloe Luisa Piñero: Fever Dreams

October 15 – November 14

Reception October 15: 6-8 PM

The elegance with which Chloe Luisa Piñero treats her painting materials allows us to comfortably approach her maximal, sometimes hypersexual imagery. Assortments of found-objects intertwined with intricate painterly compositions amount to a diverse visual experience in a range of formats including conventional painting, mixed-media assemblage, and digital collage prints. The objects and images themselves arrive from an equally broad assortment of sources including dollar-store knick-knacks and discount beauty store products interspliced with retro, pornographic cutouts and scenes borrowed from travel-agency promotions. Chloe seamlessly blends nostalgic material with images taken from present day digital spaces, including beauty and fashion advertisements from Instagram-explore pages and google images of objects and places from her personal history.

Careful examination of these supposedly high and low-brow materials and imagery might make us each reflect on the real and imaginary boundaries that dictate our behaviors and question the transgressions that simultaneously excite and offend us. 

Class and cultural backgrounds may inform our opinions when confronting objects, and often we create value assumptions about some objects while assigning fantasies to others. Within Piñero’s enchanting compositions of beachside tropical paradises, peepshow enticements, and various textures of urban deterioration, viewers are bound to unwittingly determine their own place within the complex social divisions that often mold our ideas of desire and value in America. 

However familiar or foreign these images might be, each of us ought to find a small part that’s strange and beautiful or ugly and alluring in Piñero’s curiously ornate displays, a process that will hopefully cause us to devote more time to consider the objects we cherish or the qualities in each other that we lust after. 

Chloe Luisa Piñero was born and raised in Philadelphia, PA. She has a BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. This is her first exhibition at Hyacinth Gallery.