Chase Palmer

Born in 1996, in Louisville, Kentucky, Chase Palmer lives and works in New York. Palmer holds an MFA from University of South Florida from where he graduated in 2021. With influences ranging from the 20th Century New Objectivity movement to Neo-Futurist architecture, Palmer ’s paintings are the result from his obsession from the power of images, whether they be modern art or misleading advertisements which lavishly depict the processed foods that shake their fluffy buns at us and tarnish our disgusting intestines in reality. The artistic practice of Chase Palmer combines opposing languages of depiction. The work is an illogical burlesque of over-consumption represented through a disparate over-construction of activity. Using painting, the medium that has been the traditional depicter of both the natural world and actual histories, the artist creates a variation of discordant pictorial languages. Ambiguity in movement can act as a key in maintaining the inherent mystery an image can sustain. For the artist, an image dies when burdened with clear intentions. The restructuring of a movement is his first step in inventing a composition. Palmer celebrates strident opposing subjects sharing the same space. The conflict of whether clashing structures can be in balance with themselves is one of the primary challenges in each of his painting. The works act as a parallel world remote from and yet capable of commenting on the real one. His subjects act as weird fictions. With the concept of the weird, the artist highlights Simon Strantzas’ description that, “the weird represents the idea that there is something beyond the world that we know. It is an intrinsically terrifying notion, whether something means harm to us or not. The mere suggestion of its existence is existentially horrifying.” When thinking of the world that is built in each painting, the artist reflects on George Bataille’s statement: “It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form”. That parodic world is more immediate, experienced before reasoning settles in, transforming into describable order. Before that negation, Palmer is interested in the immediate surprise which invigorates and stuns. The ideals can be ludicrous; the sources can be fabricated.