Luce Gallery presents Noisyboy the first solo show by Caitlin Cherry at the gallery and in Europe. The exhibition brings together six large unprecedented figurative paintings of the latest artist' series. The oil paintings reflect on the overlapping desire for the black women body widespread in the United States and their subsequent longing for luxury vehicles. This aesthetic merger originated in the pin-ups of the Second World War when sexualized girls were used in the propaganda for reminding to the soldiers of their loved ones and the progress of engineering for which to fight and go back as winners.

The intention to depict male desire is subverted through the employment of an oversaturated palette and a contemporary technological ethos for disrupting images. Caitlin Cherry presents a world absent of men and suggests that what vixens wanted all along was the power of these machines for themselves to provide an escape out of the pictorial frame to liberation. It is full of black women wearing leather pants like their expensive car interiors.

The series and exhibition’s title derives from the science fiction sports film Real Steel (2011) by Shawn Levy, in which mechanical robots of the near future, like Noisy Boy, fight in the ring instead of boxers and are controlled remotely by human operators. Influenced by this story of speed, performance, greed and recklessness that results when the robot trifecta converges, the artist maintains a penchant for dystopian futurism. The works defy a culture where good engineering is a masculine sensibility and inversely mishaps in both paint and the interface of the image are wielded as welcomed interventions.

With a personal use of colour, she continues to explore the chromatic phenomenon of malfunctioning liquid-crystal displays (LCD), while the viewer leaves her matrix of distortion with a new understanding of representation.

The large-format portraits reproduce also videos posted on Instagram with young rappers very active and followed on social media, like Tokyo Jetz and Miss Mulatto or the model Buffie the Body . The still images are digitally altered on the computer in different phases before obtaining the final result, which determines the pictorial composition. Their transfer to the canvas enhances the identity that they impersonate, but it is not necessarily required to recognize the celebrity.