Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont

The mysterious portraiture of Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont comprises the interpersonal interactions with her sitters that disclose the multidimensionality of being. In her practice, Breil-Dupont focuses on the core ideas of time, questioning its linearity and logic. Her sitters are mostly her friends who, through the process of posing, become multifaceted individuals whose personal history shifts inspired by the dialogues and anecdotes of one another. She explains: “We do not exist in the same way with another person, and then with another, or yet another.” Her work investigates the human condition and explores the effects interactions have on our identities, navigating through the versatility of time.

Breil-Dupont seizes certain stylistic features specific to Flemish and Renaissance portraiture to convey a pictorial language wholly new and radical. In her portraits, she examines identity through a distortion lens, rendering her sitters to serve more than mere character resemblance —a new kind of representation where everything happens at once. By looking into notions of existentialism, her paintings rather compose a sensitive archive of the experiences that seem to encompass everything her sitters, and by extension we, go through as human beings. As poet Romain Noël writes, “Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont’s pictorial research concerns the sensations, the feelings, that is to say, what we perceive, what we feel, and what pierces us and changes our life. For all these reasons, I do not believe that the notion of representation is the most appropriate to reflect what is happening in Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont's painting.”

Born in 1990 in Les Lilas, France, Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont joined the École des Beaux-Arts in Biarritz in 2010 to develop her painting practice. In 2015, after graduation, she moved to São Paolo, Brazil, where she studied Philosophy. After three residencies, at Les Ateliers Wonder, Dune Pondicherry and la Villa Belleville, the artist moved to Carrara, where she lived from 2018 to 2020, to focus on the practice of oil painting. Her work has recently been exhibited in Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles; Newchild Gallery in Antwerp; the Biennale ArtPress, in Saint Etienne, France, among others. The artist has been nominated for the prestigious Jean-François Prat prize in 2021. She lives and works in Berlin.