Jake Chapman - NICESIS, The Unwellness of Wellbeing
Jake Chapman has spent much of his career fucking with things that are supposed to be taken seriously. Art history. Morality. Taste. Civilisation. The idea of progress. And, perhaps most importantly, the comforting assumption that underneath all the shit we’ve built around ourselves, there still remains something essentially good, free-spirited – and humane – to discover.
Nicesis: The Unwellness of Wellbeing lobs a hand grenade into the mix.
For starters, all of the paintings in this exhibition begin somewhere else. High-resolution images are sent to China, where they are reproduced in oil paint before returning to Chapman's studio to be worked on again. Calling these paintings “copies” doesn't quite cut it though; neither does calling them collaborations, which so far have involved relatively minor artists such as Hitler. And Goya. You might just get away with calling them commodities. Either way, I suspect what Jake is hinting at is art as a production system, a globalised commodity no different from any other.
The painting ‘The World Without Us’ is based on the work of L. S. Lowry. While the factories, terraces and industrial architecture remain, everyone has gone. Lowry's working population - the human traffic that brings his already sparse industrial landscapes to life - has completely disappeared. What’s left feels strangely prescient. With AI and robotics looming on the horizon, infrastructure without people is something we’re going to have to get used to; a world in which the worker has finally become surplus to requirements. A fitting end to five decades of neoliberal selfishness.
Courbet's scandalous painting of 1866, ‘The Origin of the World’ famously reduces our universal origin to its most material fact – the place we all “come from”. Being born is an event we have absolutely no control over. Despite some persisting that human beings are ultimately “born free” nobody chooses their body, their parents, class, nationality, wealth or religion, for example. We arrive in the world already contained, and most of us stay there. Whether there really is an ‘outside’ – or whether we simply move between different forms of containment – is a much thornier question.
That problem sits at the heart of this exhibition.
The three remaining paintings associated most directly with Nicesis: The Unwellness of Wellbeing push things even further. These landscapes – originally painted by amateur artists and bought for a few quid in local charity shops – remain largely recognisable as backdrops. But something has gone wrong. Bodies mutate into organs, lumps, cavities and strange formations. Human figures coexist in weirdly liminal spaces that seem to cook time. Fuck knows what’s going on in some of them, but the end result is quite funny.
Now, you’re ready for a bit of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus attacked the premise that desire is simply a private psychological matter contained within individual heads (there’s an homage to the book in the form of a single-edition etching on the opposite wall). For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism doesn't merely sell us shit, it gets inside our desires, fantasies and sense of self – breaking structures apart, releasing new possibilities, then finding ways to package, organise and sell them back to us.
Which makes “wellbeing” such a fascinating phenomenon of our times.
We now inhabit a culture obsessed with being well. From LinkedIn lunatics to clueless teens on TikTok telling grown-ups they’ve “got this” – the messages thrown at us are relentless, but vacuously thin: Work on yourself. Optimise your life. Monitor your sleep. Fix your anxiety. Eat better. Exercise harder. Practise mindfulness. Become resilient. Don't forget your winning strategy.
The possibility that you might be responding, quite rationally, to an increasingly fucked-up economic and social system is the bit you won't hear much about. For years we were warned of the deadening effects late-stage capitalism would have on our imaginations – resulting in a near-universal inability to envision any kind of future outside of it. Oh well. Don't forget there’s always OnlyFans if you’ve got the body for it (preferably while keeping your organs intact).
In Jake’s paintings the distinction between the healthy individual and our sick world collapses in on itself with all the subtlety of a Hellfire missile exploding through the concrete ceiling of a family home. Maybe, just maybe, our bodies aren't malfunctioning at all. It could be that they’re simply a natural biological byproduct that the machine produces.
Which brings us nicely to Jake’s masterwork, ‘Monument to Immortality’.
This single edition bronze takes the form of a highly realistic suicide bomber's vest. Traditionally, bronze is used to preserve the forms of our heroes. But here, it embodies the very mechanism by which the human body disappears. (I’m reminded of the Billy Connoly joke, where the Suicide Bomb Instructor sits his class down and says, “Now listen up, because I’m only going to show this once!”)
The title makes this messy contradiction worse. Monument to Immortality asks, who gets called the terrorist? The faceless state deciding on an Excel spreadsheet who lives and who dies? Or the tens of thousands of women and kids barely even registered as collateral damage under tonnes of pulverised concrete? I mean, it’s not as bad as some random kid shooting a CEO in the head now, is it? Now there’s a terrorist. Anyway. Weather’s nice out today. Come back again soon!
Unlike most exhibitions desperate to pan off some performative bullshit onto weary audiences, I’m afraid there’s no tidy moral conclusion waiting at the end of NICESIS (I mean, what would you use it for? A post on social media?) Instead, we are left with a really interesting question:
If none of us chooses the world we're born into, and that world subsequently teaches us what to think, desire, and value – not least decide if we live or die – then how much of ourselves actually belongs to us?
Scott Lawrie
August 2026
Written on the occasion of Jake Chapman’s show, Nicesis: The Unwellness of Wellbeing. 30 July – 28 August 2026 | Venue 560: Edinburgh Festival Fringe.