Before the invention of photography, the only way to record was to sculpt or paint. Coming to existence 5,000 years ago, the portrait paintings have been drawn to honor and eternalize the important and the powerful, and those who refused to comply with this acknowledged truth have been rejected as artists. However in the modern age, painting portraits on commission lessened, and instead, artists chose to paint their subjects as they wished. With the emergence of photography, having a portrait ceased to be a symbol of high status, and portraiture liberalized.

Born in 1990 in Les Lilas, a suburb of Paris, to a French-Vietnamese father and a Catalan mother, Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont is a portrait painter. She paints portraits of her people, who she knows in-depth, knows as a whole, and appreciates their existence, and for this reason, she chooses to eternalize their uniqueness on canvases. As an artist, who lived in four countries, she identifies her paintings as her home, where she belongs. The canvases carrying her people are her safe space when she travels. In the way that paintings are images we want to be surrounded with, Breil-Dupont paints her people to be surrounded with them.

The legacy of the Renaissance can be seen in the primary medium choice of the artist. Breil-Dupont remarks that colors are a language for her, and just like the evolution of languages, the art of painting grows and continuously adapts to the changing times. Hence, like our responses to all the ongoing changes, we process the painting differently. Admiring the alchemy of colors, Breil-Dupont works with them in a deeper way and interprets them through their chemical structure. She produces her own black paint, calling it “the black paste” or “bat paint”, and each time blends it on the canvas with her bare hands. The black paste holds the past, present, and future; everything else that is not seen at that moment, because what is upfront is the subject, and the black holds the subject in high esteem, in deep endlessness.

“Everyone has a whole world inside of them. We are constituted by ghosts – everything in us is older than us.” With this thought on her mind, the people that open up, sharing their core and their vulnerability, fascinate Breil-Dupont. Her subjects carry their belongings, trauma, desire, clutching on their chests. Breil-Dupont names these images “cassettes” like a recording of every aspect. An archive of humanity, the cassettes are channels that contain words, gestures, knowledge, practices, habits, values. They are her way of showing how everything is older than us and has an impact on us. With these added elements, Breil-Dupont’s canvases reveal meanings that are different to every spectator. The more you look at her paintings, the more you might see, and for some, it might be more intimate. Just like a language again, the portraits communicate with the viewers, bound to their own interpretation.

You can follow Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont’s Instagram @sai_chloe_ to learn more about her and meet her people through her artworks.

About Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont

Breil-Dupont was born in Les Lilas, France. She graduated with DNAP from École Supérieure d’Art of Biarritz in 2013, and with DNSEP from École Supérieure d’Art of Annecy in 2015. Later, the painter moved to São Paulo, where she studied philosophy at PUC and assisted several artists. After three residencies, which were at Ateliers Wonder, Dune Pondichéry and Villa Belleville at the end of 2017, she moved to Carrara and subsequently to Berlin, where she lives and works.