PRESS RELEASE
ERIN CHAPLIN | Cocoon
Jun 19 – Jul 18, 2026
ERIN CHAPLIN | Cocoon
19 June - 18 July
Everard Read London presents a collection of new paintings by Erin Chaplin, one of the more distinctive young voices in contemporary South African painting.
Chaplin applies her paint with exceptional impasto density - almost sculptural in relief, the surface reading as much as physical object as pictorial image. She builds the picture plane through heavily loaded, directional mark-making and the effect is one of restless accumulation rather than composed arrangement. The sheer physical density of the paint suggests that something excessive has happened here, that more has been put down than required. This surplus of material feels emotional rather than decorative.
Chaplin’s interiors are rendered from slightly elevated, tilted viewpoints. Architecture is suggested rather than described and seems to dissolve at the edges. The overriding sensation is one of being drawn in against your better judgement; the surfaces are uncomfortably close, as though the ‘normal’ breathing space between viewer and painting has been removed.
The slightly vertiginous viewpoints induce a low-level disorientation; you cannot quite find your footing in the space or work out where you are standing in relation to the room. This is unsettling in a way that is hard to name because the subject matter is ostensibly domestic and safe. At the same time there is something deeply familiar and even tender about these interiors. The red flower - a recurring motif - reads as a sign of human presence, warmth, someone having arranged something. It also functions as a chromatic anchor, the most insistent note of pure saturated colour against grounds of broken, mixed hues.
In her flower paintings Chaplin fills the entire canvas with blooms; the flowers press against their frame – contained, but barely. The impasto reaches an almost reckless density - paint is built up in ridges and furrows that almost cast shadow, so that the flowers exist simultaneously as subject and as raw material. The mark-making follows the logic of the petals, spiralling and curling outward, but with enough autonomy that the brushstrokes read as gestures in their own right. “There is a release that I experience when painting thick and quick,” notes Chaplin.
Chaplin’s flower paintings are seductive then unsettling - you are drawn in by colour and the familiar pleasure of flowers, then held by the physicality of the surface, the refusal to beautify cleanly. There is an edge of melancholy that arrives belatedly, after the initial pleasure.
In Chaplin’s tree paintings she compresses densely interlocking branches into a shallow pictorial space that offers no sky, no horizon. Out of the dense green foliage, forms emerge and dissolve. These works have a writhing, almost animate energy - the branches reach and grasp, the dark armatures of the trees are rendered in a muscular, red-brown that feels corporeal.
This new collection of paintings shows Chaplin operating across three modes and, together, they reveal the range and consistency of her vision. There is an underlying tension in Chaplin’s paintings - they are alive, excessive, indifferent to the viewer's comfort - and this makes them linger in the memory.
This is Erin Chaplin’s first solo presentation with Everard Read London.
For more information, please contact: info@everardlondon.com, +44 (0)207 590 9991 www.everardlondon.com | @everard_read_london
