GENEVIEVE CHICOINE: A REVIEW BY ROY HARTLING

It is refreshing to consider work that, while not devoid of strategy, is so content to revel in fleshy sensuality. Chicoine observes the traditional forms and devices of light and shadow and line and space, but she is never satisfied with simply comprehending visual form. Her work performs a high-wire act between putrescence and vitality. Even when the subject is morbid, we sense that Chicoine takes wicked pleasure in embracing and covering her images in paint. She finds a way to combine the cool realism of photography with the tactile pleasures of paint. She teases us with the play between the hidden and the revealed. Her work incorporates the contradictions between photography and art. Photography in its traditional role as a describer of surface is often uncomfortable placed next to art, which by definition is the result of artifice. Chicoine embraces this dichotomy and employs it as a strategy. While it is fun to consider these implications, what really strikes the viewer here is the exuberance with which Chicoine approaches the body. Everything in her images is more rotund or rippling or more somber or decayed than in its reality. In the end it is Chicoine's lyrical hyperbole which makes her work so engaging.