101/EXHIBIT is proud to present Anti-Realism by Phoenix-based artist Colin Chillag. The opening reception with the artist will be held from 7 – 10pm on Saturday, February 28th. This is Chillag’s second solo showing with the gallery. Anti-Realism will run through April 18th at the 101/EXHIBIT West Hollywood space, located at 8920 Melrose Ave on the corner of North Almont Drive, one block south of Santa Monica Blvd. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 300 count limited edition show poster replicating a work from the show.

What we see in Chillag’s work is a hyperrealist painter’s process of thinking and looking, over several months time, unfolded onto a single canvas. Passages of intensely detailed realism appear alongside hastily sketched areas. Often he includes notes and to-do lists, color mixing tests, blobs of thick oils, and laconic spray-painted lines. Varied mark-making techniques, from painting to sketching to writing, coalesce in Chillag’s work.

When he decided several years ago to work within a hyperrealist context, Chillag’s choice arose from a sincere admiration for the complexity of the visible world—no matter how quotidian the subject matter—and his desire to study that world as objectively, as “truthfully,” as possible. Working from photographs of Arizonan gas stations and tourist destinations, crowded city streets, and family members, Chillag spends months translating images of frozen half-seconds in time (that is, photographs) with as much fidelity to his subject’s appearance as possible. In Portrait of Jenna Taking A Self Portrait, for example, Chillag renders precisely even the too-bright highlight from the sun’s light in his wife’s hair.

Yet this is no real truth, as Chillag reveals when his hyperrealism’s intense finish dissolves into sketches, under-paintings and notes-to-self. Meditative in effect, these passages show the tracks left by Chillag’s brain, drawing connections between things and things-to-do, wandering through varied creative spaces. Chillag refuses to adhere to any pretense of painting as a window onto another scene or a fixed moment in time. Instead he allows viewers a glimpse of his consciousness; that is, his experience of both the world and his process of depicting it. In Chillag’s work, the desire for objective truth battles with the impossibility of realizing that truth in pictorial representation.

Thus Chillag only half-follows in the footsteps of older greats working in the hyperrealist genre (such as Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle), who rendered the visible world in acute detail and monumental scale; their realism becoming more real than the real. Instead Chillag embraces failure. Given the pointlessness of fully finishing something already photographed—and therefore already represented with more detail than possible by the human hand—Chillag never fully “finishes” a painting and instead leaves his daily thinking apparent to his viewers. When looking at his work, we look with him.

Born in 1971, Colin Chillag lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona. Chillag’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions across the United States as well as numerous group shows. His most recent solo show occurred at the Phoenix Art Museum, in tandem with the Mid-Career Artist Award he received from the PAM. Other venues include the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Angstrom Gallery in Los Angeles, and Pravus Gallery in Phoenix, Arizona. Chillag’s works are in the permanent collections of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Arizona State University Art Museum. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993.