Jo Chate
Jo Chate is a painter based in London. At the centre of her practice is the exploration of space and how we experience the world we live in, our environment and surroundings. Starting with photography as source material she captures moments and phenomena from everyday life.
Alongside working on paintings she paints on prints and frames, often painting over the surface again and again. Working with underpaintings has become part of her methodology, it is all part of the same process of defamiliarising the familiar, absorbing and changing until the final image evolves from the ones gone before.
Chate’s formal process is performative and dance forms part of this practice. The synthesis of colour and form is created by her perception and movement. The paintings carry their own internal rhythm. The choreographic physicality in the making of the work creates the rhythm and a sense of movement across the canvas. The surface is activated translating internal space into visual terms.
The work embodies dualities, counterbalancing structure and chaos, abstraction and figuration, absence and presence, mental and physical space. All the elements are fluid and tangible, they conjure and collide with an emotional intensity resulting in connections and complexities that are not easily definable.
The paintings attempt to communicate something other than representation, they go someway beyond depiction toward a re-imagining of the world. They are simultaneously familiar and strange with an emotional intensity imbued. The paintings ultimately become the site of transformation; refracting and colliding memories with future recollections.
