Chase Biado. Elf Energy

About

Typically engrossed in the psychological and the melancholy, Biado takes Elf Energy down a different path toward a glittering microcosm within his invented world, where the melancholy lives alongside electric energy. As intimated by the title, the paintings exude an excitement, an energy radiating from a source of light, typically in the form of a disco ball. In the past his depiction of light has been crepuscular, described by the artist as the “end of night feeling”. The scenes depicted in Elf Energy convey a “beginning of night feeling”, with Elven subjects en route to, or in the midst of a celebration. Instead of overtly celebratory, these scenes feel more like isolated psychological experiences. Biado equates them to the feeling of going out at night desperate for human connection, but everyone else feels like shadows. Surrounded by light and color, the characters in these scenes experience feelings and moods that transcend description, simply “a moment of being”. In a continuation of the psychological, these characters remain indicative of the artist’s view of the human experience. That is, a collection of impulses organized into thinking and feeling beings—shadow creatures playing pretend.

Light and music emanate from the surface of the paintings, the musicality evident in the interplay of shapes and hues dancing throughout. In his studio, Biado found himself listening to Sun Ra and Herbie Hancock, a blend of acoustic and spacey jazz. This interplay of sound translates visually to sparkles and blobs, light particles that oscillate between visual and musical abstractions. The circular "blobs" became the dominating visual motif in Elf Energy, with the orb composing the primary structure of these paintings—like atoms or particles that clump together—forming the elementary units that comprise a cohesive picture.
 

In the interior scene Shadows and Dust, a pulsating circular form takes center stage. This pattern is composed of smaller circular particles of color, dancing in and around a disco ball, diffusing colored light across the picture plane, and anchoring two figures gazing at one another, eyes aglow. Not to be confused with “crepuscular”, this is reminiscent of the “corpuscular” theory of light. This fringe scientific theory dominated the conceptions of light in the eighteenth century, and states that light is made up of small discrete particles called “corpuscles”. Biado’s blobs act as corpuscles throughout this body of work, each part comprising a whole. This is a deliberate mistranslation of light to paint, not intended to replicate the physics of our world, but rather find the picture logic of feelings. Oversized stars above a twinkling cityscape in Another Night in Elf City illuminate the scene in a different way. Moodier and deeper than his interior scenes, a lone figure in a trench coat stalks toward an unknown destination, either terribly alone, or on their way to the festivities. In a rare diversion, Memory Orb depicts a lone disco ball, the last work completed and intended by the artist as a kind of talisman for the exhibition.

Part of Biado’s continued depiction of fantasy and the everyday, he describes his Elves as “mytho-psycho selves”—fantasy pretending to be human. By incorporating mythological elements into scenes based in reality, the artist engages in “play-logic”, a term coined by him and his partner Antonia Pinter in describing their joint project, A History of Frogs. For Elf Energy, the second exhibition space is devoted to these sculptural works, a series of unique brass and bronze bells complimenting Biado’s previous investigations in the the self-designated “Goblin Baroque”, and part of their alternative history of the world. Here both artists explore material and thematic transformation made visible through world-building and object-creation.