Chloe Saï Breil-Dupont: All Doors Opened

all doors opened

in all the sounds that i hear,

i’ll be talking with your words.

and if you crave to eat me

i’ll be your flesh

i’ll hold you closer

and in the storm, and in the rain 

i’ll be sitting here

all doors opened

I kept repeating these words on my scooter. I rode fast into the night, and saw the lights become lines around me.

In my cement apartment, the rain drummed and the walls became waterfalls.

My body was changing, transforming as I spent more time in this city, and I let the surroundings wash over me. As an extension of my body, my painting also changed. It became sweaty, fast, watery.

That's how this exhibition came about. It's an exhibition about light, about the resistance of light. It represents a loss of rigidity, a form of fragility. I'm talking about the resistance of light in the sense of Pasolini, when he refers to the survival of fireflies in cities. In big cities, we can't see fireflies because they're illuminated by blinding lights. But they do exist. And if we turn off these lights, we leave a space for them to express themselves, to become visible.

— Chloe Saï Breil-Dupont

Chloe Saï Breil-Dupont began painting the works within all doors opened, her third solo exhibition with Nicodim, during the hot and sweaty monsoon season in Ho Chi Minh City. The compositions are transient: she collected her subjects first in Berlin, her previous home, then in Vietnam, where she first committed them to canvas and spent nine months refining the imagery, then finally they arrived in Los Angeles, where she completed the works with texture and detail. Creating the paintings became an allegory for her practice itself: forever moving, forever transforming, forever opening doors and windows to express itself, to become visible.