Vanessa Conte: Swell
Serious Topics is delighted to present VANESSA CONTE: SWELL, an exhibition of twenty-four tiny paintings that tell a circular narrative about Amy, a fictional character from the artist's nautical comic AMY: THRILL TO LIVE.
The price of admission is the pleasure of seduction. Pastel pinks and blues, a fun animated quality, and the way the drawing abstracts things just enough invite you in with visual pleasure.
Amy's flesh—supple, voluptuous, uncontrollable, bountiful—is subjected to domination. Stretched, squashed, tied, beaten, her body transgresses impossible female beauty standards while being manipulated and played with. She's drawn like a rubber-doll who can bend without breaking—cartoon physics meets oil paint's materiality. Painting, like S&M, becomes an exercise in control. The formal qualities create a buffer that makes it possible to look at Amy crying, ecstatic, injured. The paintings are both document and psychological projection.
Conte herself has lived with chronic pain and credits early mentors Lisa Yuskavage, Lari Pittman, and Susanna Coffey with showing her how to use vulnerability as source material for painting. Drawing a controllable source of pain enacts agency in a parallel realm that can alleviate powerlessness and offer transcendence.
The viewer leans in close because of the small scale and the viewer is you. You're in it. You're close. You're enjoying the bound curtains of flesh, the compositional choices, the color relationships. And you're looking at what you're looking at.
Vanessa Conte studied painting and art history at New York University, where she graduated with a BS in Art History and Studio Art in 1999 and later moved to Los Angeles to study at UCLA, where she received her MFA in 2004. She began her exhibition career in Germany, where she has since exhibited at Kunstmuseum Baden, Solingen; Kunst im Tunnel at Kunsthalle Duesseldorf; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; Halle fur Kunst, Luneberg; Sammlung Philara, Schmela Haus, and Van Horn Gallery, Duesseldorf. After moving back to Los Angeles in 2009, Conte earned her MA in Linguistics at Cal State University, Long Beach and subsequently continued to regularly exhibit in Europe. In 2023, Conte had a large-scale solo exhibition at Kunstbunker: Forum fur zeitgenoessische Kunst, Nuremberg. Conte has also exhibited at venues in Los Angeles, including a recent solo show at Babst Gallery, California State University, Dominguez Hills, the Torrance Art Museum, the Chan Gallery at Pomona College, Commonwealth and Council, Human Resources, and Night Gallery. This will be her first exhibition with Serious Topics.