NEW YORK.
Over the past 5 years, Christopher Chiappa’s studio has been filling up with fried eggs. They surfaced initially in drawings and then as actual fried eggs, draped casually on studio surfaces, candid photos snapped. The eggs multiplied and mutated as he eventually adopted their form for hyper-realistic sculptures constructed through a carefully calibrated process of casting, pouring, sanding and painting plaster. As he refined his method, they evolved into uncannily illusionistic “sunny side up” versions of their former selves.
Chiappa’s fried eggs operate squarely within the uncomfortable intersection of these two symbolic legacies, mining the darkly humorous vein where perfection and failure meet. The title of his show, LIVESTRONG, confronts this duality, using a well-known cultural symbol as a metaphor for belief. There are no heroes; there never were. This is familiar territory for the artist, whose visual lexicon frequently revisits figures from his suburban childhood – such as Weber grills, basketballs, and Volvos – to plumb the psychological depths of these gestalt images of mundane but wholesome American exceptionalism.
Photos: Kate Werble Gallery.
