Downtown Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery (CHG) is proud to announce their next major solo show Handle With Care, featuring new works from the award-winning San Marinian artist and world-renowned children’s book illustrator Nicoletta Ceccoli. The exhibit premieres on October 29th in Gallery 3 and will be on view through December 3rd.
Ceccoli’s paintings explore how childlike wonder and innocence can curdle into emotional turmoil and darkness. The artist’s paintings invite you into a magical and wonderful world where role reversal and the blurring of lines between good and evil remind us there is not as fine a line as we often suspect between who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s afraid. Known for her richly detailed, dreamlike work, Ceccoli has described her work as attempting to “offer a delectable balance of repulsive and attractive.” Adding, “What is beautiful and sweet often hides dark suggestions.”
In this new body of work, Ceccoli brings together themes of love and loss, innocence and maturity, life and death. She describes her narratives as an “examination of my strengths and weaknesses” and paints it all with an irresistible sense of humor and “psychological tension.” In the artist’s own words, “I show our fragile nature as humans. I blend the childlike and innocent with the grotesque by painting adorable-looking porcelain toys to look like biological beings, sometimes wounded and disturbing to look at, featuring elements of the grotesque and the cute breaking down, which pull the viewer between these opposing poles.” In one work, we see a pink tufted and fragile ballerina figurine conjure her own head from a top hat as she ponders the whereabouts of her own mind (seen above), while in another, we witness the quiet yet mighty power of Little Red Riding Hood as she tames the big bad wolf with her charms.
Ceccoli adds, “Showing vulnerability is how I come to understand more about myself and the world I inhabit. Just like in life, you can see a duality in these works. Childlike fantasies are punctuated with anxieties common in adulthood. Nothing is completely black or white. You can’t have the sweet without the bitter. These works reveal my deepest fears and are a way for me to fight back against constraints, as well as seek power, independence, creativity, spirituality, and magic.”
Featuring 13 new paintings, rendered in acrylic on paper, Handle With Care marks Ceccoli’s third solo at CHG, following Relazioni Pericolose (November 2019) and Hide and Seek (August 2017).
Handle With Care opens Saturday, October 29th from 7:00 pm – 11:00 pm in Gallery 3, alongside a solo show from Brandi Milne, titled Everything I Ever Was, in the Main Gallery.