In 2016, journalist Véronique Hyland coined the term “millennial pink” in New York magazine, a phrase that defined an era of skin-care brand campaigns, Big 5 book covers, and crop-top micro trends. The pale-salmon tone, a color somewhere between rose quartz and ear canal, inaugurated the current golden age of chromatic desaturations: butter yellow, Gen Z purple, and sage green, to name a few. The pastel movement—and particularly its pink—are what The Guardian, in 2017, called “ironic prettiness, or post-prettiness.”
Charlie Engelman’s debut solo exhibition at Château Shatto, “Pith,” played in pretty’s soft wreckage. Across two gallery rooms, trendy colors—faded rose, pale lavender, milky beige—infused forms that resembled disparate architectural elements, building materials, and body parts. These airbrushed sculptural confections felt almost provisional, as if an influencer had designed a house and gone bankrupt during its construction. Fastened with neon-green zip ties or hung at awkward heights, Engelman’s artworks coolly dismantled the environments that shape real and digital life, offering something more fragmentary, elusive, and strange in their place.
Engelman’s renderings of decorative refuse suggest pasts both near and far. In Marquee (all works 2025), a rounded, rectangular foam beam—executed in what could be termed “quiet-luxury pink,” an even paler, more bloodless version of 2016’s millennial shade—extended a few feet across one wall, recalling, as the press release cited, motifs derived from “Art Deco mausoleums.” If you, like me, are unfamiliar with early-twentieth-century tomb design, another referent emerged: the 1970s Ulatragola mirror by Memphis Milano, which went viral in the past few years (Architectural Digest wrote, in 2022, that its curvy, illuminated edges have “been duped to death”). Color for your heart similarly subverted fixed styles using shape, texture, and hue: Two stacked cylinders—one a pale coral, the other a sumptuous red—recall tapered Greek columns, movie-theater curtains, and the preternaturally tactile poufs at IKEA.
These design-inspired elements, though, were disjointed from any complete form, and thus gained further associative power. Under Engelman’s hand, ultrasmooth matte surfaces become supple as skin, suggesting both human limbs and pillowy plastic detritus—what one imagines a Rhode makeup ad might feel like. In Heart talk, a bundle of three coral tubes were knotted together with a black cord, all resting on a red-velvet podium. Their cushioned texture recalls fingers or arms, while the sculpture’s composition implies an odd set of vinyl table legs or poles that have been accidentally left behind on a plinth. If they aren’t conventional structures or bodies, they could be art—but references to traditional display, such as pedestals and frames, are winked at and disavowed. Drip trip featured layered, pliable beige pipes—they look like flaccid penises or fat rolls—hung on the wall like a painting.
Material deceptions turn Engelman’s multivalent artwork into seductive trompe l’oeil. In Untitled (portrait), what looked like a bent wooden snake—colored purple and fastened with a Brat-green zip tie—was actually a painted aluminum cast, secured with brass hardware and silicone molding. This fakery extended to Engelman’s most humanoid work, Untitled (drawing), which utilizes the same components as Untitled (portrait) to create a multipart sculpture that resembles a slouched, line-drawn figure, its violet legs splayed out across the floor. The resulting artwork dwells in some middle ground—between authentic and ironic, human and not, real and artificial.
But Engelman’s material ruses are far from simple. Salvaged redwood artworks demonstrated the sculptor’s skill and laborious process, lending the delicate and unforgiving timber the same glossy, bodily treatment as the urethane-foam works on view. In Sap heart pith (For John Leen), an elegant, burnished lumber block sat atop a modest carpenter’s bench crafted from the same material, as though offering a window into the careful handiwork required to produce the silky, seemingly untouched sculptures in the exhibition. And it did: Heart talk’s pedestal, in fact, was crafted from the same old-growth tree. One could imagine the artist perched on a stool, sanding the curved redwood base that peeks out from below its maroon cylinder.
Pretty things, especially those found online, feel increasingly like gimmicks: capitalist ploys that, in critical theorist Sianne Ngai’s words, strike an embarrassing chord between “labor-saving tricks” and “strained efforts to get our attention.” Engelman’s laborious sculptures flirt with the contemporary aesthetic trends that compose those gimmicks’ current vernacular, from muted Instagram palettes to Memphis Milano knockoffs. The result, though, was closer to wry commentary than internet scam. These artworks were left deconstructed and scattered around the large gallery, suggesting the haunting dissolution of the body, the built environment, and even the picture-perfect cybersphere—no matter how polished and pastel it may be.
