Jaque Mate — Cristina BanBan

We are pleased to present Cristina BanBan: Jaque Mate, an exhibition of new paintings opening September 10th at Skarstedt Chelsea. Taking its title from the Spanish term for checkmate, the exhibition expands BanBan's exploration of the female form through a consideration of the body as a permeable entity constantly reshaped by its proximity and relationship to others. In chess, every interaction between pieces alters the response and position of the whole. Likewise, with these new paintings every gesture, lean, and point of contact effects change on the entirety of the composition.

For years, the female body has been the constant in BanBan's practice, the vessel through which experience, memory and emotion pass from artist to canvas. In Jaque Mate, its purpose is redefined. It is declarative and victorious. The attention now turns towards what happens in the charged space where one body meets another. "I am interested in thinking of the body as something inherently unstable, continuously reshaped by proximity to others," the artist explains. The women of these paintings are rarely alone. They wrap around and warp into each other, or brace against another's weight, and their limbs blend so that it's unclear whether that knee or that arm belongs to one body or its neighbor's. In Inter Corpora, Latin for "between bodies," three nudes interlace until the composition reads as a single form. In Corpus Commune, or "a common body," two women square off face-to-face while a third half-figure emerges at the chest of one; a group of legs in the center seems to belong to no one at all, and these forms are locked into one continuous silhouette. These entangled groupings recall the flesh-laden compositions of artists like Peter Paul Rubens, though here devoid of any allegorical context. In BanBan's conception, we are shaped by our experiences with others and every encounter leaves a mark.

These works explore the effect of relationships on a more existential level. The way these bodies come together and drift apart can be tender or tense, reflect desire or reticence, and never arrive completely at resolution. If the women of BanBan's earlier paintings carried the bearing of goddesses, these figures edge toward the monstrous. In Magna Mater, whose title invokes the ancient mother goddess, faces tilt and flesh smears with a visceral charge recalling Chaïm Soutine, for whom distortion was never disfigurement but a way of getting closer to the truth of a body. In BanBan's hands, as in his, the grotesque becomes its own form of devotion, and the divine gives way to something rawer and more alive. This visible layering of accumulation, obfuscation, and revision mirrors the exhibition's central thesis. These figures preserve the evidence of their own making, functioning as a tally of exchanges.

Each work in Jaque Mate tests how near two bodies can draw before the line between them gives way, and it is at precisely this point of collapse that figuration and abstraction stop opposing each other and start to work in tandem.