Alexander DiJulio

Alexander DiJulio is pleased to announce Chambliss Giobbi's Friends With Benefits, a solo exhibition of melted Crayola encaustic paintings which will kick off the fall season in the Lower East Side. Featuring a selection of small and miniature works on linen, Giobbi's newest body of work unites iconic paintings from art history, forming hybridized but surprisingly original imagery. The use of children's crayons to reinterpret masterworks is humorous, but the incredible detail and precision in each piece has to be seen to be believed.

The exhibition features works such as The Sword of Damocles, 2023 which pairs paintings of David Hockney with that of Ed Ruscha in a high contrast unification. In other instances such as A Room With a View, 2023 and The Libertines, 2023, Giobbi blends his subjects in a way that makes it almost impossible to know where one artist's hand begins and the other's ends. This creates an uncanny effect where the works can begin to feel like original compositions where we may recognize an element from the source material, however the final product reads as entirely original.

The scale of the works in Friends With Benefits demand that the viewer take a step closer to make better sense of just what exactly is at hand. There is a sculptural element and a tactility to these paintings that is only apparent upon closer inspection. Giobbi shaves crayons down onto a heated surface in order to mix his colors which are applied using fine brushes and burnished with his fingers to finesse the surfaces. The results of this technique yield raised surfaces and hyper-accentuated details which never existed in the flat surfaces of the artist's original source material and further pushes the work into a category of its own.

about the artist:

Chambliss Giobbi (born 1963, New York, NY) is an American artist, known for his tiny encaustic paintings on canvas made from melted Crayola crayons. Before shifting into the field of contemporary visual art, Giobbi went to Boston University and earned his BFA in Music Composition and Theory in 1986. He began composing classical music at the age of 17, and at the same time, made collages. Eighteen years later, after a Guggenheim Fellowship and nomination for the Pulitzer, the prolific composer stopped composing and became a full-time visual artist.

In 1991, he received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and five years later a Guggenheim Fellowship. His solo exhibitions include those at Fortnight Institute (NYC), Frosch & Co. (NYC), two at 101/Exhibit in Los Angeles, California and two at MiTO Galeria de Arte Contemporaneo in Barcelona, Spain. His work was exhibited in group exhibitions in Barcelona, Bucharest, London, Detroit, New York, East Hampton and Miami, and is held in the permanent collection of the Museo De Bellas Artes in Santander, Spain and International Collage Center in Milton, Pennsylvania.