LENNA CHRISTAKIS - Playing Life, 2025. Oil on canvas over panel. 18 x 24 in.
smoke the moon presents The Real Thing, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Lenna Christakis (New York, NY). Christakis’s oil paintings play within the constant slippage of the real. Her work proposes a world that valorizes the counterfeit as its own reflection of reality. The Real Thing is a graphic, technicolor landscape of modernity’s simulacrum.
Throughout the digital are core references to the world in its most natural and elemental form. Christakis’s paintings take up signifiers of the natural throughout the nostalgia of a gamified century. Her paintings churn through the visual evolution of the analog to digital game, making observations about the insidious legacies of attention and beauty throughout the two. There is a wistfulness within The Real Thing. Christakis is recalling a bygone digital era and her own early web influence, thinking back to simple internet games and childhood wonders.
The paintings in The Real Thing lay bare the surreal and often comical slips of consumption and production within the fanfare of the everyday. Prismatic, lab-made gems burst out from the earth, the before and after of a candy crush game and gem mine sitting side by side. A faded American flag sits under a ribbon-cutting ceremony in space. The Loch Ness Monster appears in digital capture inside a flat screen. Fake snow floats out of frame, the globe appears flat and then accordions into cut paper kirigami. In another work, the Fata Morgana appears inside a synthetic horizon; the atmospheric optical illusion floating behind strips of variegated blues. The paintings present a pop landscape of another world—like a postcard with the volume turned way up. The artist’s typical graphic style is interrupted in this new body of work with moments of loose depiction: wild and brushy moves insert a new tone into hills and seascapes.
Christakis plays with the irony of translation throughout The Real Thing. The artist is interested in the larger questions of depiction in this body of work—as it applies to painting and visual culture on the whole. The history of landscape painting is itself the fantasy of place. The early greats of the style would paint a vista by drawing on an amalgamation of locales, without allegiance to the reality of place but instead to the sublime experience. Christakis takes this one step further, relishing in a sort of artistic transparency that is both idiosyncratic and in on the joke. A bank of color akin to a printer test page often appears in her work—a color palette in its most elemental form, letting the viewer in on the choice within the work. Christakis is offering a map of images, stacking references to narrate how the paintings evolved.
The work in The Real Thing serves as a herald of nostalgia’s psychedelic gaze and a reminder that looking closely is, itself, a surreal task. Christakis coalesces this knowledge into a hallucinatory postcard of reality’s fantasy. Fakes reign in her work, if only for their particular ability to reflect a deeper truth.