Iconic Outliers

Excerpt from the essay to accompany the forthcoming exhibition at New Art Projects

by Cherry Smyth

There’s something eerie about Jo Chate’s paintings: a sense of dislocation in time and place, matched with an elusive familiarity, and throughout, a pulse of female strength that feels ancient and surpassed. ‘The G Code’, 2026, named after Lizzy Jeff’s song ‘The Goddess Code’, offers a redoubtable figure, stood with purposeful poise, in short yellow dungarees, a red bra, and a tight-fitting cap.  Pink, flame-like brushstrokes push up from the bottom of the canvas, while orange tiles press down from the top, in a conversation between gestural abstraction and formalist grid paintings.  Chate’s figurative elements are almost swallowed by the abstract urge: capacious swathes of red; spills of orange; and a blue shape like a bruise or apology.  Here, the figure’s featureless face, suggests her inability to see or speak, or the presentation of a mirror onto which we can project ourselves. Chate sees her as a warrior and so the featurelessness could also point to the suppression of ego and individuality required to be a good leader.  There is a strong sense that the figure is from another world and can’t quite find her ground in this one. Chate explains that she merged the mannequin that has featured in previous work with Piero Della Francesca’s ‘Madonna Della Misericordia’, 1460-62, in which supplicants kneel under the Virgin’s black mantle for protection from divine judgement.  Here is the ghosting that alienates and attracts in Chate’s paintings – in the composition lies a vibratory note of recognition.  The crucifixion is echoed in the mantle, bestowing Mary with Christ’s suffering.  Perhaps Chate’s figure represents a black Madonna, for a time when racial hierarchies will be outmoded, an icon of female empowerment beyond the constraints of white, patriarchal capitalism which frames so much of our cultural imaginary.  Can art devise new armatures of faith, of belief?…

In ‘Senza L’Ermellino (‘No Ermine’), 2026, the influence of Da Vinci’s ‘La Dama con L’Ermellino’ (‘Lady with an Ermine’), circa 1492, is palpable with its elegant androgyny, the delicate mid-profile and the cap.  The head and body, however, are disjointed, as Da Vinci’s head sits awkwardly on the body of the red-bra mannequin.  As if assembled by AI, these two icons can’t fit.  Chate tells me that Da Vinci’s subject, Cecilia Gallerani, was the lover of a member of the Ermine Order, so the animal in the portrait highlights his protection.  Others argue that the ermine represents purity or pregnancy.  For Chate, to remove the ermine, is to remove the man, to re-establish female autonomy.  She challenges the hierarchy of high and low art, creating a hybrid that bristles with a new body of vision.

Chate’s work aims to reflect female subjectivity in a world that often feels post-divine.  How do we renounce the mannequin body and consumerist crutch to gain a wider mind over this impermanent matter?  In her book World as Love, World as Self, Joanna Macy argues that when we give precedence to mind over matter, as happens in most patriarchal religions, ‘a split occurs, weakening our relation to the natural world and the wisdom of our own bodies.’ She goes on to say that ‘Mind is the subjectivity of any system experiencing itself,’* and that to know the mind is to know the universe.  Can paintings, such as Chate’s, help usher in new levels of systemic mind?  By imagining a presence, or co-presence with what was experienced as the divine spirit by Renaissance artists, Chate intimates what could come from a matriarchal divine in the future.

* Joanna Macy, World as Love, World as Self, Parallax Press, California: 2021, p.67