EMANUEL

Kathryn Cirincione grew up knowing that her ancestors painted church murals and crafted stained glass in Southern Italy — that art was not decoration but devotion, a bridge between the earthly and the sacred. This encaustic panel feels like the moment that inheritance finally crystallized: a crowned Madonna, hands pressed in prayer, emerges from layers of hot wax as though surfacing from memory itself, her halo replaced by dozens of radiating spikes that recall both the sunbursts of Catholic iconography and the charged marks of a printmaker's plate. The image at the center carries the ghostly quality of a found photograph — worn, tender, slightly damaged by time — while the encaustic field around her pulses with physical presence, its surface scratched and built and burnished until it glows silver-black like old metal or darkened church gold. Flecks of turquoise and cerulean interrupt the monochrome, small gestures of vivid life within the solemn ground, like votive candle light caught in a dim nave. In Bolinas, at the edge of the Pacific, Cirincione brought together the news she absorbs each morning, the family icons she carries in her memory, and the ancient wax medium that dates to Greco-Roman antiquity — and made something that feels both urgently contemporary and quietly eternal. This Madonna does not belong to any single tradition or century. She belongs to anyone who has ever looked for grace in difficult times.