Shimmering Tale, Chris Cosnowski, Dolby Chadwick Gallery
By: Hugh Leeman
American artist, Chris Cosnowski's exhibition Shimmering Tale of still life oil paintings depicting toys and trophies at Dolby Chadwick gallery in San Francisco ask the viewer through the ancient coded language of the genre to decipher meaning in our era of postmodern myth-making, examine cultural narratives, and consider the absurdity of the present as we analyze images the artist spent countless hours producing by hand to realistically represent objects made in mere seconds through mass production.
Shimmering Tale's use of still life contributes critical contemporary social commentary to a genre that has historically shown us that beneath the surface of material culture lies the opportunity to examine the values of the societies that consume the depicted objects. More than three millennia ago, the ancient Egyptians realistically depicted food on the tomb walls of the elite, believing that these images could become real in the afterlife. Two millennia ago, in ancient Pompeii, similar works reveal the society's sense of self. Although early 16th-century art critic Giorgio Vasari looked down upon the genre, by the late 16th century, Caravaggio brought it new life with his talents and inspired painters across Italy and Spain. Still life, however, is most often associated with the excesses, evolutions, and phenomenal social changes of the 17th-century Netherlands.
In 17th-century Dutch still life, one finds stunning representations of personal possessions, testament to commercial prowess, and the diversions of everyday life with an undercurrent that meditates on time. These works are best known for their flowers, whose ephemeral beauty speaks to life's transience while hinting at ethical dilemmas. In Shimmering Tale, Cosnowski's paintings perform a similar act, as his hyperrealistic representations speak to social concepts similar to those found in 17th-century Dutch still life, while humorously hinting at the dilemmas of today.
Cosnowski's paintings conceptually connect deeply with the late 20th-century French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's writing. Baudrillard coined the postmodern term hyperreality to describe the growing avalanche of images in society and the yearning for distraction that had led to the creation of images less intent on showing us reality than on reshaping our perceptions of it. In Baudrillard's hyperreality, the genuine experience loses its luster to the shimmering appeal of the multiplicity of imagery. When real life becomes inferior to the images that depict it, society's affliction is most readily, albeit temporarily, treated through nostalgia.
Cosnowski has expertly rendered and curated the still life as if photo shoots on social media aggrandizing mass-produced toys and trophies, nostalgic for a great American past that the artist hints is ambiguous at best. Nostalgia, his paintings suggest, is a natural reaction to postmodern skepticism triggered by the overwhelming amount of information and imagery. The objects rendered as plastic, gilded in cultural critique, speak to the power of myth to cast itself through multiplicity as if fact, and eventually into Baudrillard's hyperreality.
The great role of the artist is to expose cultural narratives that have become so normalized that we forget they are constructed. The stories encoded in Cosnowski's still life remind us of the stories a culture consumes to make meaning of its fears and project pride from its fantasies as if they were reality. Such a process is visualized in Shimmering Tale through the artist's depiction of plastic objects mass-produced from a mold.
Old Mold, 2024 Oil on panel 23 x 23 in
In Old Mold (2024), the artist brings to life a pressed plastic trophy of a king in faux gold, backdropped by a gradient of lush purple, the color long associated with royalty, whose complement to the yellows in the gold trophy sets that painting alight. The artist's talent is evident in both technical acumen and concept. As the plastic has seeped out of the side of the mold, it has misformed the edges of the trophy king because the old mold has cast so many copies that its edges no longer align. Perhaps, the artists suggest through cipher, society is ready for a new mold to create a new ruler.
Shimmering Tale, 2025 Oil on panel 55 x 45 in
The exhibition's titular painting, Shimmering Tale (2025), shows us through the oversized trophy of a Cowboy on a bucking bronco the allure of America's great cultural tale: the tough guy who tames the wild west, bringing civilized culture and the freedoms of individualism through westward expansion to the teeming masses. The cowboy and his metallic luster, alas, are just plastic made to resemble gilded metal, confronting the viewer with the conceptual reality of identity construction through the mass production of artifice.
Eden, 2025 Oil on panel 14 x 24 in
The cultural narrative extends beyond the American West and into the Western Hemisphere's most fertile field, feeding countless cultural values and inequalities, Eden. In Cosnowski's Eden (2025), a deer, a serpent, and a pink bunny meet in front of The Tree of Life, all elements cast in plastic, offering a postmodern interpretation of the classic. Here, the artist's humorous repackaging of the myth, once rich with ancient theological gravitas, becomes fit for our age of challenging universal truths.
The toy animals and tree in Eden exchange the story's sense of cosmic centrality for a modular group of accessories, as if Fisher-Price were commissioned to depict the book of Genesis. In doing so, moral tales become the commodified playthings of a consumer society's imagination. The deer is a proxy for the presence of Christ or longing for God, and the serpent for temptation, along with the tree itself, are deeply connected to the original telling of the tale. Yet, the pink bunny appears as if a glitch in the story, a result of society making a copy of a copy of the story for so long that it begins to mirror the artificiality of the bunny's pink plastic color. Cosnowski's pink toy bunny further evokes Jeff Koons' Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny) (1979), a readymade from vinyl with mirrors, whose presence in the world of high art challenges cultural hierarchies and questions value systems. Precariously, in Eden, the pink bunny is easily within striking distance of the serpent's temptation.
Step Right Up!, 2025 Oil on panel 14 x 14 in
In Step Right Up (2025), the viewer is greeted by Disney's smiling plastic Jiminy Cricket standing proudly atop a Rubik's Cube set on a pure white table. The unsolved Rubik's Cube stands as a visual shorthand for the complexity of society. To solve the 3D puzzle, there are reportedly 43 quintillion potential variations. Amidst so much possibility, the artist asks what is guiding our decisions in solving such perplexing situations as those with which we are faced today.
The answer, it seems, is found in Jiminy Cricket, who served as the conscience to the famous lying puppet Pinocchio. Pinocchio wanted, more than anything, to be a real boy, not just a toy, yet for such a transformation, he would have to tell the truth and be unselfish. Thus, Jiminy Cricket was set to task to keep the puppet's nose from growing amidst the prevalence of complex decisions Pinocchio would incur. Chris Cosnowski, ever the conceptually clever tactician, nods at the absurdity of our current state of reality, his paintings acting as time capsules of our era's complexity. With a bit of nostalgic memory, one might recall it was Jiminy Cricket who famously said, "What's a conscience! I'll tell ya! A conscience is that still, small voice that people won't listen to. That's just the trouble with the world today."
The brilliance in Shimmering Tale lies in its coded language, which reads as a modern American saga. If one looks closely enough, the viewer can untangle allegories painted into the plastic pieces of nostalgic realism that allow us to see the beliefs, behaviors, and cultural memories of a nation, akin to more than three millennia of still life painters, from anonymous ancient Egyptian tomb painters to the 17th-Century Dutch still life or an Andy Warhol soup can, all tell fascinating tales about the societies in which the material culture was consumed.
Majorette Trophy (Follow the Leader), 2022 Oil on panel 48 x 30 in
Images Courtesy of Dolby Chadwick Gallery
