Corona

Nancy Cicchetti started, as she always does, with a photograph — a moment caught through glass on a night out somewhere vivid and loud. A woman, boots planted, leaning forward across the saddle of a mechanical bull in a bar window. The Corona sign glows above like a small, neon moon. It could be anywhere in the American West. It feels like everywhere at once. From that starting point, Cicchetti went to work — deepening the shadows inside the bar, intensifying the teal of the bull until it became almost mythic, letting the reflected brick wall breathe its red warmth into the whole scene. The figure becomes less a specific person and more a feeling: abandon, laughter, the particular freedom of a night that doesn't ask anything serious of you. The cowboy boots ground her — literally and metaphorically — while everything above flickers and glows. This is the kind of painting that makes you feel like you were there, even if you weren't. It is a story already mid-sentence, and Cicchetti has left the ending deliberately open — for you, the viewer, to walk through that glass and finish it yourself.