Title: When You've Eaten Everything Below You, You'll Devour Youself/Except In Dreams You're Never Really Free
Artist: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer
Year: 2020/2021
Medium Type: Print | Digital archival print on Epson Hot Press Natural 330g/m2 paper
Frame: Unframed
Certificate and Signature: Signed and numbered by the artist on recto
Limited Edition of 50

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Celeste Dupuy-Spencer
American, b. 1979

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s work is infused with drama and a certain grotesqueness, operating as a way to mediate our visual understanding of things and our cerebral/emotional ones. What results, in many cases, is dark comedy. Exaggerated features make prominent the noses, wrinkles, and jowls of flawed people, their flaws personified. The paintings are filled with anger, longing, resentment, humor, shame, and a total lack of fear around self expression and they brood over lived experience. They travel to Celeste’s childhood places, her recent, wrought time living in New Orleans, and her reconnection with painting and all the avaricious baggage it carries. Like a true satirist Celeste looks at her cultural heritage and surroundings with a magnifying glass. Half Jewish, half Cajun Celeste paints to honor the proletariat, in the communist tradition of her family, but also to identify with them as an afflicted Southerner. The paintings reflect a certain horror and ennui of our time, inescapable poverty, and unforgivable wealth. They examine this divide, and others; between the north and the south, between Republicans and liberals, and between the artist’s class (if such a thing exists) and artists themselves.

The paintings pay little mind to a “style” of painting, though Celeste’s intimacy and comfort with paint, as well as the painted subject, is obvious. With an earnestness that mirrors Celeste’s love of country music (which is, eventually, infectious to those around her) the work is infused with song, just like life, or at least any life worth living. What Celeste is reading, watching, and hanging on to (pictures, notes, favorite mugs, ashtrays and other small possessions) all get painted into the work. And these collected things are part biography, part feminist creed. Her serpentine doctrine, though, keeps the work dialectical. It is this unrealistic love of humanity, and perhaps an unrealistic love of self that unifies the characters in these paintings.

Very soft crease noted on the edges.