PRESENTATION: Shannon Cartier Lucy-A Stapled Glass

With a career of endless experimentation spanning over twenty years, Shannon Cartier Lucy is one of the most celebrated figurative painters working today. Her paintings are the prelude to endless narratives: representing incredibly little while suggesting so much. Her painted images initially imply cohesion before disconnecting the narrative from its source and developing their own contradictions.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Massimodecarlo Gallery Archive

At first glance, Cartier Lucy’s subjects are familiar but bizarre by nature: a woman stretching her back, a girl with hands tied in a red rope, a finger pointing in a dark void, a stapled glass. Her works are both ordinary and absurd, comfortable and uncomfortable, ironic and disturbing.  The exhibition “A stapled glass” premieres the first solo with Massimodecarlo Gallery and her first exhibition in Asia. Consisting of seven new paintings created in 2021, the exhibition shares its aesthetic language with the seventeenth-century Baroque master painters of shadow and light. What appears familiar transforms to become the lead to another level of narrative, suggesting confusion of information. However, this is what makes them so unique. A knife cutting through two peaches, a bird feeding its hatchling with a butterfly, a woman looking down; despite the simplicity of the images, Cartier Lucy’s works hide a peculiar opacity. Cartier Lucy infuses her painting with uncanny and impossible situations that become a new normality in her work. The artist is a cantor of the inner world; her practice can be seen as a mirror of a dystopic society, whether intentional or accidental, reflecting a sociocultural landscape filled with hallucinatory and contradictory information. Shannon Cartier Lucy moved from Nashville to go to NYU in 1995, and had a lot of luck, early. She happened to take a class with Lisa Yuskavage. She started painting full time, became the nanny for gallerist Andrea Rosen’s and painter Sean Landers’s kids, and by the year 2000 was in a group show at the Team Gallery, alongside figures like Genesis P-Orridge and Banks Violette. Team was followed by three solo shows in three years, at Cynthia Broan and Kathleen Cullen. It was the kind of quick ascendency most artists in their 20s hope for — and one that came with a number of personal crises. She got married, then divorced. She got deep into drugs. By 2011, she’d left New York, and returned to Tennessee to try to save herself. But she continued to paint. Lubov’s founder, Francisco Correa Cordero, Cordero got in touch with Lucy in 2019, after seeing her work on social media, and the 43-year-old artist seized her chance: She loaded up a rented van with all the paintings she’d made over the past two years and drove 14 hours from her home in Nashville to the gallery, in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Cordero tried to manage her expectations, but he needn’t have: Lucy’s show at Lubov in January of 2020 sold out on opening day. What could be seen as overnight success has in fact been a long, circuitous journey. The 2020 show marked Lucy’s comeback after a long absence from the art world; it was her first exhibition in New York in a decade.

Photo: Shannon Cartier Lucy, A STAPLED GLASS, 2021, Oil on canvas, 71 × 86 cm / 28 × 34 inches, © Shannon Cartier Lucy, Courtesy the artist and Massimodecarlo Gallery

Info: Massimodecarlo Gallery, 12 Pedder Street – 3F Pedder Building, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 9/12/2021-10/1/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:30-19:00, www.massimodecarlo.com