Chase Biado at The Pit Los Angeles

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Chase Biado, Little Hope (detail) (2023). Oil on canvas, 60 × 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and The Pit. Photo: Ed Mumford.

In Liquid Night, Chase Biado’s first solo exhibition at The Pit Los Angeles, the L.A.-based artist opens a portal into the underworld of the everyday. By infusing his paintings with mythological elements and nonhuman creatures such as golems, demons, and fairies, Biado engages in “play-logic,”¹ a term that Biado and collaborator Antonia Pinter use to describe the hybridization of fantasy and reality in their project A History of Frogs (AHOF). While it might be easy to assume this approach is a form of escapism, Biado employs play-logic to do the exact opposite. By playfully ushering his work into the realm of fantasy—or “arresting strangeness,”² as J.R.R. Tolkien described it—he nudges his viewers to expand their assumptions about their everyday experiences, making room for other ways of being.

Surprisingly, the more that Biado augments his scenes with elements of the fantastic, the more the worlds of his subjects seem to resonate with our own. Though the ears of his figures are long, pointy, and distinctly elven, for instance, there’s always a sense of familiarity in their postures, which register emotions like pain, loneliness, and awe. Gazing into an elf’s sparse, moonlit living room in An Ant in the Valves of a Seashell (all works 2023), for instance, I felt close to the figure curled in a ball at its center, not distant. Not unlike the flora in my own home, an under-watered monstera wilts in one corner of the room, while palm trees shiver just outside the arched window. With the small Pierrot clown perched in the center of the carpet and the ominous shadow lingering in the doorway, it’s clear this is a non-human realm. And yet the moody, beet-toned scene still feels like a polaroid of an L.A. bungalow. In this way, although Biado’s work employs play-logic to explore the farthest reaches of imaginary, alternative worlds, walking through Liquid Night, I felt perfectly at home.

Color also plays an important role in heightening the mythological worlds imagined within Biado’s elaborate mise en scénes. Each work is richly saturated and almost invariably monochromatic, with colors like moss green, midnight blue, and blood red drenching each painting from top to bottom. Like a filmmaker who uses color to reinforce a feeling or idea, Biado transmutes emotions like shame, aimlessness, and fear into scarlet, indigo, and emerald, drawing his viewers into the complex interior states of his figures.

The background of Wrote Nothing, for example, is painted almost exclusively using an ominously dark blue. The nude figure in the foreground, whose eyes are gently shut in contemplation, appears absorbed into the wall behind it—a powerful visual representation of the way emotions can warp our experience of time and space. With their insistence on monochromatic palettes, Biado’s paintings act as portals into psychological states of being that are otherwise often unseen.

In Little Hope, another nude elven figure, this time with merlot skin, sits on the edge of a brick wall. Beside the elf rests an empty green bottle and a tiny clown who frowns and slouches. Accentuated by a melancholic red sky above, the entire painting is drunk with sadness—the hills beyond barren, the flowers wilting—and all of it weighs on the elf’s arched shoulders. The figure’s listlessness is tangible. While there are many ways to visualize melancholy, Biado’s dramatic use of color and fantasy open a door for the viewer to fully empathize with the figures in his work. Especially because the appearance of these fictional figures transcends signifiers like race, class and, in most cases, gender, the magical realm of Biado’s paintings represents a universal entry point into the expanse of human emotion.

In The Right Now That’s Ever Changing, a plain elven figure seems trapped in the lonely glow of a ceiling light, an island in the otherwise pale subway corridor—their arms are locked at their side, their eyes blank. Though there are two other figures in the painting, Biado captures the precise feeling of being utterly alone. Of course, light blue isn’t exclusively the color of loneliness, but Biado’s specific use of a cold, lifeless blue accented by an almost-garish neon green sharpens the figure’s apparent aimlessness. As these emotional cues resonate, the strangeness of Biado’s fantasies dissolves and the distance between his figures and myself closes. I am absorbed by his work.

Even while many of the paintings in Liquid Night pressed into the extremes of the emotional register—dejection, despair—others investigated the quiet moments that fill the rest of our lives. The woman-elf in Night Red hovers in the doorway of a candy-red bathroom, clutching her towel to her breast. The crimson walls and her startled posture suggest fear, rather than melancholy. Her eyes smolder milky white as she gazes out toward the viewer—and, it seems, she notices you noticing her, as if you were the apparition, not her. On the surface, there is nothing sublime or otherworldly about this moment, and yet, Biado has represented the unsettling feeling of being alone in an empty house.

This is the magic of Chase Biado’s work: not, per se, his imaginative holograms of strangely familiar realms but the fruit of his explorations into the often uncomfortable depths of the mind. For Biado, dramatic, mythological symbolism and play-logic are means to a distinctive end, tools he uses to mine the ups and downs of the human experience, however mundane those moments can seem.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 33.

Chase Biado, Night Wine (2023). Oil on Canvas, 60 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and The Pit. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Chase Biado, Wrote Nothing and Honorableness of Bad Thoughts (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and The Pit. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Chase Biado, The Right Now That’s Ever Changing (2023). Oil on Canvas, 60 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and The Pit. Photo: Ed Mumford.

Chase Biado, Liquid Night (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and The Pit. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Justin Duyao (he/him) is a contributing editor at HereIn Journal. A San Diego-based art writer, he is the recipient of a Make|Learn|Build grant from Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council and a writing fellowship from the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at PNCA. His art writing has been published by Oregon ArtsWatch, Variable West, The San Diego Union-Tribune, HereIn Journal, Vanguard Culture, and Southwest Contemporary.

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