
The New Uncanny: Winston Chmielinski and the Unlikely Heirs of Freud
by Anna Khachiyan
If photorealism is a kind of sophistry—the exploitation of virtuosity in the absence of imagination—no one knows this better than Winston Chmielinski, a young Brooklyn artist whose oeuvre has mined the best of the genre. Like a good cover song, Chmielinski’s art is both an improvement upon and a spirited interpretation of the original medium. But if writing about dead artists is hard enough, writing about a living one is even harder. At the very least, there’s the issue of intentionality. Specifically, you run the risk of imposing an interpretive superstructure in retrospect or where none exists. At first glance, it’s easy to picture Chmielinski’s work as a kind of glorified dental office art—all broad strokes and bright swathes but very little substance—yet it’s just as quickly apparent that this isn’t the case...
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