Chelsea Culprit

Known for vibrant high-heeled figures, explosive palette and multimedia production, Culprit is taking a much more reduced approach to the material component of the exhibition at Lulu. The show revolves around a new body of work developed over the summer in a mountain setting. The exhibition sees the artist further developing their  specific pictorial vocabulary with a striking material economy which does anything but diminish the dramatic impact of the work. Using nothing more than home-made charcoal on  unprimed canvas, Culprit creates a fantastical natural world inhabited by seemingly urban, nocturnal chimeras or trickster wood sprites. These masked, high-heeled figures elliptically lurk, elastically cavort and all but dissolve into their arboreal surroundings, (in)organically collapsing the boundary between the human and non-human in an elegant tangle of lines. Clearly performing (a quality aided by their quasi-mural-sized scale), they seem to fluctuate between wanting to seduce or terrify, irresistibly inviting the viewer to enter their  fluid wilderness. Despite the material simplicity of the work, it nevertheless writhes and roils, thanks to the artist’s bold and confident mark making, with a patent formal opulence and feverish energy. Here desire and being become a splendidly knotted and strangely shaped thing.
— Lulu