04.29.2022

Chase Biado
Feywild

For Noon Projects’ spring exhibition, we are honored to present Feywild, a suite of luscious oil paintings by artist Chase Biado. The work lauds the space of fantasy as an exploratory psychological realm, presenting a cast of characters whose identities are boundless. Defined by the intoxicating sensuality of Biado’s palette and the whim of each picture’s respective protagonist, the work swoons in the power of the unconscious.

The title of the exhibition borrows from the fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons. The Feywild is ‘The Plane of Faeries,’ a realm where the senses, emotions, and color are not only heightened and expanded, but respected as powerful prowess. Rationale and the intellect are not the masters of this domain, and to enter, you must feel your way. Biado’s metaphor here is multivalent, electric, and points a tapered finger towards a society more concerned with power than possibility. He uses the concept of Feywild as a touchpoint to champion the unconscious, opening the realm of dreams as a space to test true freedom and jettison/examine all of her tender baggage. With Feywild, Biado explores the spatial dimension of freedom as if to ask, how do we create space, where and for whom?

But in reality, fantasy is not a luxurious indulgence. It is woven into the everyday. For Biado, “fantasy is a psychological fact, wrapped around reality, molding it and propelling it forward. We are all constantly living in a fantasy, of who we think we are, and what we’re moving towards.”

Feywild is the free place. In the wake of a conceptual milieu, Biado paints. He flaunts color despite its reputed shroud of romance and heralds risk despite the probability of failure. And out of it, joy, death and reckless abandon, “like dancing at the end of the world.” The characters he creates are beyond self-consciousness, as identity is without construct, and to be is full-blown — BWAMP! Pointed ears, rat brass, a wine-coloured atmosphere in which a flautist summons a glittering storm, a green-skinned figure runs through a tornado of tulip petals with their arms and hair flying, free — these are the emblems of a feeling of wildness that painting can conjure. It is an act of pleasure and life, of feeling, where the banal can be made psychedelic and there is space to be playful. “Because I believe [painting] to be actual magic, a conduit to the subconscious, a forever mystery.”

Text by Amy Bernstein

Chase Biado (born 1985, Portland, Oregon) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, California. Biado is one half of A History of Frogs, an art and design studio dedicated to the exploration of forms through a re-historical morphological fantasy. Recent exhibitions include Frieze LA, Marta (Los Angeles, CA), Neutra VDL House (Los Angeles, CA), and Other Places Art Fair (San Pedro, CA).

Exhibition

April 29 – June 4, 2022

Opening Reception: Friday, April 29,
6:00 – 9:00 pm