The painting organises an improbable encounter between fragments of different provenance: sculptures taken from the British Museum, toys and pop-culture figures, colliding in a scene where scale and hierarchy break down.
Against a dark, almost nocturnal ground, the head of an inflatable duck dominates the left side of the composition, opening enormous eyes that look towards something beyond the frame. Beside it, the wing of a saint from the American colonial baroque and the sculpture of a hound from the Parthenon dissolve into soft edges, while a carved club rises on the right, against a vast mass in the background. The painted surface, marked by drips and blurred passages, destabilises legibility and holds the whole in an ambiguous zone between dream and accident.
The title names the operation. The chimera is the mythological creature made of dissimilar parts, but also a figure of contemporary cultural bricolage: something new built from the ruins of the old. The work operates within that tension, assembling the remains of the European canon with the images of mass culture and returning them to painting as a single body, irregular and impossible, that nonetheless breathes.
Gallery
