Charis Entwisle: The man obsessed by the shape of a heart

CHERRRYBOy Magazine — Optigram

Charis Entwisle in his studio, Central Saint Martins, 2019

The subjects, models, they characters. The personalities from the other-worldly are not read as... Provided only snippets of scenes or a flat wall in front of which someone stands, hints of a story emerge that we itch to guess at. Teenagers are occupied by a quaint activity or simply embedded in the poetry of the dull white cube studio. We are seduced by the fragmentary nature of Charis’ pictures and how he situates his appealing faces.

Charis grew up in North London with his painter father Mark Entwisle, whom he reveres for teaching him his favourite pass time. Being originally a North Londoner myself, I have since crossed the watery border. I decided to transcend the North/South divide and rang him up recently for a call. On the subject of his Dad, he mentions the power of growing up around the process of painting.

Instead of solely witnessing a painting as masterpiece, all glorious in its finality and pomp. I think we are all above the notion of painting being the very blood in Charis’ veins (!!!), but there’s a certain truth to the legacy of father-son painters. The mind springs to Picasso’s father and Velázquez’s father-in-law, but maybe that’s just my Art History degree getting carried away with itself. Or perhaps this personal aspect to painting that Charis has is sewn into the want for putting his friends in his pictures. “If I had it my way I would paint people every day,” he says. Whether it’s Matt standing in the studio or Frankie eating cereal, he allows the person to perform. Having been subject to his direction myself in the past, he provides us with a lot of agency, allowing the slightly unordinary comportment of the artist/subject dynamic to come through, interrupting the regular comfortability of mate time with Charis.

“An idea is always centred around people and relationships. I wanna paint people that I would like to spend time with and photograph.” He works only from photographs, claiming to be wholly unspontaneous. But he extracts a certain charm from the candid photograph, musing at the painting of Imogen in a face-mask, endearing in its serendipity. The paintings satisfy that kind of painterly that we all want out of the post-mechanical reproduction image-object.

“A banal idea for a photograph becomes one
that people want to deliberate on in a painting.”

Long-wedded to the realm of two dimensions, Charis makes use of collage, but for him the painting was always going to be the finished result. Photographing, printing, painting, projecting, pew pew pew pew!

He says that he’s always flirted with the idea of film-making, but being the textbook lone painter, the idea of collaboration on a filmic scale is understandably daunting. His film fanaticism is not so inconspicuous. A lot of his paintings could read as movie posters, or even mid-scene. If I tell you that his favourite film is Billy Elliot, does the blue-tinted adolescence that we are looking at now make sense? There’s a real youthfulness to his paintings, a feeling of distilling the present, a nostalgia for what is not yet past. Whimsy acts itself out in a way which is down to how much his work is so much enjoyed to the point where it becomes play. It is as routine to him as Weetabix in the morning is for others.

The base of it is, he’s a proud North Londoner (quite right), a home body and an absolute devotee to painting. He loves what he does. He wears paint-splotchy shoes and smells of turps and Stella. Just joking, but only half - you get the idea.

@t_charis

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