SMAC is pleased to present Gilded, a solo exhibition of new work by Luiza Cachalia. Join us on Sunday, 3 May from 11h00 at SMAC+ Project Space, 65A Shortmarket Street, Cape Town, City Centre.

Luiza Cachalia has long understood that cultural residue shapes our personal understandings of gender. Her interest in the societal constructs of womanhood recognises Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that femininity is consistently shaped as a site of ‘Other’ in relation to men such that femininity is defined as an object rather than a self. Where Cachalia’s earlier works meditated on those women who defied the system, who became heroines of hysteria and abject cruelty in defiance of the patriarchy, in Gilded she has turned her gaze to those who inhabit the glittering cage, whose rage within the system of patriarchal signifiers is coolly sold back to them as aspirational lifestyle.

Gilded within the system, Cachalia’s characters leak their emotional turmoil as signifiers of disquiet from within their role as patriarchal ornamentation. Her reference imagery for these women is drawn from contemporary cinematic portrayals popular on mainstream television networks. An emotional anguish perpetuates her re-presentation of these female characters forced to colour their lives within the lines and further objectified as consumable characters in visual entertainment.  In her paintings of these actresses Cachalia unpicks the coded womanhood on display. The question her paintings encourage through this process of portrayal is not who but what is being depicted. The remediation of female characters into visual entertainment opens up a unique space for contemplating their function as objects of femininity. Objects that inform contemporary signifiers of womanhood.

In her paintings, Cachalia flattens the cinematic portrayal of these characters rather than reanimating them. Her painting balances a tension between control and chaos. Thin washes of colour define mask-like skin compared with the impasto representation of embroidery, make-up and cigarette smoke. The drawn line structure of her figures is often left exposed with painted elements held in a balance between line and form. This act of exposing the artifice of representation, of a resistance to precision, is used to alert us to moments of emotional instability and imperfection in these portrayals. Her subject matter is centred on cinematic portrayals of characters such as Marie Antoinette, the French Queen whose decadence and frivolity is blamed for the demise of the French Monarchy, Princess Diana, whose public interviews about her failed marriage and inner emotional turmoil has forced the British Monarchy to reconsider its persona, and Princess Margaret, a side-lined royal whose unhappiness was starkly evident within the royal family. Sitting Pretty is altar-like in form, bringing this trio to the fore as examples of women trapped within the gilded patriarchy, described by that same system of control as unstable characters of frivolity who threaten the status quo.

Where Cachalia’s characters and painting process turn to disorder and imperfection is where the artist hopes to expose truth. Common to all the portraits in Gilded is a deep sense of anguish defined by vacant stares and a dissolution of form. In contemporary media, signifiers of femininity continue to cast womanhood as object: as an entity of display valued as ornamentation. Women may weaponize the things ascribed to them by patriarchy: beauty, hair, make-up and jewellery but such devices are simultaneously co-opted by the system and resold as aspirational products. As subversion gets flattened into aesthetics, patriarchy tightens its constraints. Cachalia insists that the type of female anguish this engenders in contemporary life is not new to womanhood. It was always there beneath the gilding.