Porous Bodies: Diane Chappalley

The body of work making up Porous Bodies sees significant evolution in the artist’s practice. Previously, Chappalley foregrounded narratives using solitary female figures, but in these works, created following the birth of the artist’s second child, Chappalley’s practise revisited the non-figurative approach she had previously explored earlier in her career. This change of gear reinvigorated her practise, sparking up a renewed sense of possibility and freedom. That confidence and energy shimmers across the surfaces in Porous Bodies, the exhibition’s name itself addressing the impermanence and ambiguity of figuration.

Chappalley explains that in this body of work, “not thinking about figures allowed me to be more in touch with my intuition during the making of this series. This body of work has been very liberating for me, and that freedom has become central”.

The artist’s intuitive process began from the ground up – literally. In this series, she built her works upon sustaining, earthy tones by painting on thin linen, primed with a transparent ground, rather than white gesso. This allowed the natural sandy-brown tone of the fabric to become an active component of each composition, the weave and weft of the linen visible between, and beneath, layered strata of paint. This gives these works a tangibly organic foundation, an emotional warmth. The exposed sections of the surface function as a breathing part of the painting itself, a manifestation of Chappalley’s interest in porosity between body and environment.

While these paintings reference some of the structural qualities of landscape painting, the artist transcends these techniques to create vast psychological and emotional terrains. These are Chappalley’s imagined environments, that exist somewhere between memory, dream and sensation. Fluid perspectives play with scale and form. Horizons carry ideas. Spatial relationships erupt, expand and collapse into one another. You can see that the artist is forming tentative questions in these non-resolved scenes.

“Painting creates ways of understanding what’s beyond ordinary existence,’ says Chappalley. ‘I see these works almost as psychological spaces, but they don’t quite answer where we are. Ambiguity is important to me’.

And this delicious opacity is central to the work. A dense floral form – Chappalley insists her flowers and plants exist as purely visual forms - may simultaneously resemble flesh, roots, or geological formations. Blooming flowers emerge from darkling surfaces, like fragments of memory or symbols, half-recognised. Atmospheric passages carry the eye between sky, water, fog and mist. Then there are the trickling veins and vessels, resembling the dense networks within the body.

The artist’s upbringing in the Swiss Alps also continues to inflect the emotional atmosphere of the work with an enduring connection to nature and ritual. Long since based in London where she studied, Chappalley’s childhood of mountains, forests lurks within the melange of psychological ideas emergent in these paintings.

Flowers function as imagined forms, loaded with emotional, symbolic and compositional significance. For Chappalley, the use of flowers holds an especial resonance. When she was studying at the Slade in London, a close friend died. Before her passing, she gave a mutual friend some poppy seeds, which the friend took and planted near her home in the Alps. On the day of Diane’s first trip home following her friend’s death, the first poppy came into bloom. Diane was deeply moved to see this, feeling it was a poignant sign.

“And that inspired the first flower painting I ever made,” Chappalley says today. “Since then, I’ve never really stopped painting flowers. They have become symbolic for me – they’re used at births, deaths, at the moments when we have no words. They somehow fill the gap between emotion and language. It creates ways of understanding what’s beyond ordinary existence.

Flowers are not only a means to convey a spiritual dimension to existence, but act as an intrinsic metaphor for the power of painting and the imagination and recur and thrive across Chappalley’s works. “The atmosphere changes around flowers, that’s partly why I’m drawn to them. They create immersion - and I think paintings can do the same thing”

Within Chappalley’s floral motifs, lurk heart-like forms appear, buried beneath layers of paint like hidden seeds. This emerged from a deeply personal experience: the discovery that her newborn son had a congenital heart condition. The emotional impact of that period led Chappalley into an extended exploration of the heart as both biological organ and cultural symbol.

And motherhood is a powerful emotional catalyst that runs throughout this series of paintings. While Chappalley describes new motherhood as an experience that is both “very banal almost - but extraordinary as well” – she articulates a universal truth, childbirth is an everyday occurrence that nevertheless transforms one’s perception of existence. This duality runs throughout the paintings themselves. The works move constantly between intimacy and vastness, between biological reality and cosmic scale.

While several paintings embody a system of circulation, or growth- roots becoming veins and flowers resembling bodily organs, Chappalley describes some of the newer works as increasingly “cosmic”, gradually opening into more atmospheric spaces. There’s more than a hint of such masters as Hilma af Klint, Leonora Carrington or Georgia O’Keeffe in this  approach, artists who summoned mystical and universal questions within collapsing floral, bodily and geological motifs and symbols.

Importantly, the paintings were created sequentially, each work responding intuitively to the last. Rather than approaching the exhibition through predetermined compositions or sketches, Chappalley allowed the body of work to evolve organically, with each canvas generating the emotional and spatial conditions for the next. Earlier works in the series remain more contained and grounded, while later paintings expand into larger, more immersive environments.

This progression becomes especially evident in the exhibition’s monumental two-metre paintings. These larger works are an intensified physical presence for both artist and viewer - vast fields of colour and atmosphere, all-encompassing transcendence, an experience Chappalley describes as “pure freedom”.

Research into Catholic ex-voto offerings, ancient symbolism and devotional objects is another aspect explored in these paintings. Belief itself is a recurring idea here, the belief in painting continuing Chappalley’s passion for exploring spaces capable of reaching beyond language, wordless emotional and psychological states, where nature colour and sensuality are essential carriers of meaning and experience.

Porous Bodies presents a body of works that like flowers after the rain, unfurl slowly, making viewers pause, slow down and allow themselves to float within the shifting dense thickets of nature and memory, body and landscape, intimacy and immensity. The result is a body of work that feels deeply personal while remaining open, expansive - and profoundly human.