About Charis Entwistle

Charis Entwistle is a London-based artist and recent graduate of BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. His practice spans painting, drawing, photography, collage and, more recently, animation.

Entwistle’s work is a play of romance and melancholia. The works depict tangential scenes with a strong focus on mood created through the use of blue tones. Often, the narrative centres around heterosexual relationships, incorporating sentiments of narcissism and loneliness into these scenes with a strange sense of comedy. The artist seeks to make work that carries a morbid subtext, but that is easily-accessible, evoking a subtle awareness of sadness in the viewer.

There is always an underlying sense of vanity in Entwistle’s pieces. The figures are nearly-always camera-aware and the backdrops they are staged against are always particularly contrived. Set into these scenes, the figures oscillate between character and object, never interacting with each other. They become mannequins, inhabiting a world that is deliberately contrived. Through these compositions, the artist seeks to probe the beauty of vanity and indulgence. For Entwistle, fantasy is an inescapable and necessary part of our lives, as evoked in the writings of the cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek's in his readings of Lacan, and of popular culture.