David Chieppo presents a series of small-scale paintings in the upstairs gallery for his first exhibition at Taxter & Spengemann. Chieppo was born and raised on the East Cost but has been living in Zurich, Switzerland for 10 years.

Chieppo’s paintings transmit an air of distanced nonchalance, though this is not to be mistaken for indifference. Largely inspired by film stills and popular media photographs and headlines, the works emit a strangeness and familiarity that is not quite legible but nevertheless strongly felt. Peculiar scenes conjure precise emotional states and much less specific places, as if the artist has devised a method of crafting a purely psychological environment. This is not to say the paintings aren’t funny. The viewer is quickly disarmed by the awkwardness of the subjects, their blankness and the absurdity of their situation, and the artist’s often joking or punning titles, leave the solemnity of the proceedings in question.

The paintings are not overworked, suggesting that the artist has a well-tuned sense of “just enough”, and a healthy suspicion of losing psychological atmosphere through undue agonizing over surfaces. Chieppo paints in a calculatedly crude manner that manages a contradictory level of grace and directness without leaning too heavily on conventions of “bad painting.” In his panels, abstraction and figuration are interwoven and easily exchanged, conventions of portraiture dissolve into repeated floating marks swarming about a subject’s head, and landscape is called into romantic service with just a few spasmodic brush strokes.

David Chieppo lives and works in Zurich. This is his first solo exhibition in the United States. Chieppo is the recipient of the 2008 Manor Kunstrpreis, Kantor Zurich which also awards him a solo exhibition next year at the Kuntsmuseum Winthertur. In 2007 he had a solo exhibition at the Centre Culturel Suisse, in Paris., and was included in A Fantasy for the Moment at the Kunsthalle, Bern. In 2005 he had a solo exhibition at Galerie Brigitte Weiss, in Zurich.