Jennifer Pochinski: No Shallow Pools

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to present No Shallow Pools, an exhibition of new paintings by Jennifer Pochinski.

A figure cast in yellow, a purple shadow on the cheek, a brush of orange paint becoming a  nose in one swift lunge toward the canvas. In this exhibition, each brushstroke aims to surprise. Pochinski’s bold pigments and confident hand vie against the expected but feel instinctively true. Her intuitive palettes illuminate a Fauvist sensibility, with gestural mark-making and strident colors leaving the viewer transfixed and curious.

Abundance echoes in these new works, redolent of rich landscapes and decadent dinners. In Girl Meets Boy, nude bodies are obscured by overgrown foliage. The human becomes a contemplative observer, inundated by the flourishing natural surround. In Birdman or Fish in the Sea, repetitive iconography creates a canvas rich with visual stimuli, absent of negative space.

Pochinski’s bathers, clad in swim trunks and speedos, never fail to incite a smile. For Pochinski, painting the male figure can serve as an exploration of the masculine side of herself. Growing up, she felt shy and apologetic, fettered by traditional “femininity.” Through painting, she embraces a more “masculine” confidence. On the canvas, both male and female figures bask in bare-chested assertion. Couples lay undisturbed in lush gardens, Edenic and shameless.

Pochinski’s compositions are alive and buoyant, borne out of a playful exploration of time and space. The painting is a chronicle of the weeks and months spent creating it. Vibrant underpaintings peer through the surface, and early marks appear next the latest ones, collapsing time on the canvas. Each painting is a catalogue of decisions made, in turn with careful thought and excited urgency.

In No Shallow Pools, Pochinski highlights the inherent depth of painting. She paints a visual and textural palimpsest where multitudinous layers of pigment are glimpses of the thrashing beneath the surface. In the titular painting, a swath of black befalls the water as glimmers of blue and red rise from below. The surface is but a mirage, an undulating allusion to what is beneath.

Pochinski was born in Detroit in 1968, and earned a BFA from the University of Hawaii in 1991. This past year, she was a visiting lecturer at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, and Athens, and has been featured in publications such as the Paris Review, the Huffington Post, and the American Scholar. This is her second solo exhibition at Dolby Chadwick Gallery.