Chloé Kelly Miller, a young contemporary artist and confirmed talent, invites the public into her creative universe with the exhibition “Sublimation” at the Carrousel du Louvre, until June 17, 2024.
Chloé Kelly Miller at the Carrousel du Louvre
Chloé Kelly Miller has established herself as a rising figure in contemporary art. A multidisciplinary artist, she juggles various mediums—photography, acrylics, graffiti, inks, oil pastels, and drawings—touching on the essence of art as a process of revelation.
Self-taught, her spontaneous and eruptive work captures latent images and sensations, revealing the experience of self and otherness. Chloé Kelly Miller’s portraits are deep explorations of questions of identity and representation.
Chloé Kelly Miller discovered her art alongside her studies in psychology, with a focus on psychoanalysis, a discipline that profoundly influenced her artistic work. Her practice began in 2018, embedded in often automatic mechanisms aimed at liberating and exploring the unconscious. Now exhibited until June 17, 2024, at the Carrousel du Louvre, she shares with Icon-Icon the background of this exhibition:
“The Sublimation exhibition was conceived about two and a half months ago. This exhibition is part of a festival around diversity, and I wanted to approach the theme of Sublimation spontaneously. Sublimation, above all, from a theoretical, psychoanalytic angle, is a psychic process that greatly contributes to sublimating and thus also partly creating, fostering creation.”
The creation of the “Sublimation” exhibition was swift, spanning a month and a half. Chloé Kelly Miller describes the collaborative process:
“This project emerged about two and a half months ago, and so because we had to prepare a number of things. The construction and development of this exhibition took place over about a month and a half. Due to the speed, poets could regularly write something on their side and then with Manon Perret, who is a writer friend, we tried to gather the paintings and poems that matched the best.”
For Chloé Kelly Miller, the canvas space is a playground where she stages the body and color to sublimate affects. She favors a spontaneous and impulsive gesture, seeking to question what governs humans beyond language. Bright colors and black backgrounds dominate her works, symbolizing repressed affects and their movement in the depths of our psyche.
“I wanted each time to tell a unique story for each work based on the shapes. The question of the figurative is always at the heart of my work, so there is this plurality of bodies, often floating, sometimes slightly deconstructed, fragmented; this remains the guiding line of my creation.”
Chloé Kelly Miller draws inspiration from the personal trajectories of artists like Salvador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, and Robert Mapplethorpe. She constantly revisits their technical heritage while integrating elements of surrealism and neo-expressionism.
The artist has exhibited her works in various cities, from Bangkok to Paris, including Casablanca, Toulouse, Rouen, and of course, Perros-Guirec. Her first international solo show was celebrated in June 2022 in Bangkok, marking a turning point in her career at just 27 years old.
Chloé Kelly Miller tackles questions of identity, body, psyche, disability, and representation with acute sensitivity and an innovative approach. The diversity of her mediums allows for total freedom of expression, where each artistic gesture becomes an exploration of the human gesture itself, transcended by color and form.
Her work is an invitation to dive into the deepest corners of the unconscious, to explore repressed affects, and to embrace the complexity of the human experience.
“Sublimation, above all, from a theoretical, psychoanalytic angle, is a psychic process that greatly contributes to sublimating and thus also partly creating, fostering creation.”
Beyond the central theme of Sublimation, Chloé Kelly Miller has chosen to highlight women artists. She explains the importance of this choice:
“I wanted to highlight women. It was important to me in the context of an exhibition that would gain some visibility. I was keen to give visibility to women artists.”
Thus, the exhibition becomes a space for dialogue between visual arts and poetry, celebrating the diversity and richness of female contributions. She shares:
“The chair is a recurring support in my work. I like it a lot. I find that the chair anchors the character in the work.”
This performance perfectly symbolizes the idea of Sublimation, where each element, each stroke, each color contributes to a profound exploration of the unconscious and a celebration of creative diversity.
In summary, the “Sublimation” exhibition at the Carrousel du Louvre is an invitation to discover a plurality of artistic expressions, where painting and poetry meet.