In The Same Box

Kathryn Cirincione grew up knowing that her ancestors painted church murals and made stained glass in Southern Italy — that art was never decoration but a form of reckoning with the world. This piece carries that inheritance forward across centuries. The Italian proverb at its heart — *Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box* — is the kind of wisdom passed at kitchen tables in Calabria or Naples, the kind that outlasts empires. She has layered that proverb into a landscape of time. A horse and rider erupt across the golden center of the panel with the urgency of breaking news — or of ancient Greek pottery come to life. Below, classical warriors with wings and shields re-enact a conflict that could be Troy, or any battlefield, any century. The chess board in the upper corner watches over it all like a quiet god: the game is still in progress, the pieces still on the board. But the proverb already knows the ending. The encaustic wax binds these layers together the way memory does — not cleanly, but with translucency and depth, one era bleeding into another. Living in Bolinas, absorbing the world's noise and grief and absurdity every day, Cirincione brings it all into the studio and asks her materials to make sense of it. This piece is the answer the wax gave back.