Sevilla

There is a moment in music when the player disappears into the playing. Nancy Cicchetti has painted that exact moment. A man sits with a guitar, his body softened by the light, his edges blurring into the red that surrounds him entirely. He is not performing for anyone. He is somewhere else — inside the chord, inside the rhythm, inside himself. The red began, as Cicchetti's paintings often do, with a photograph — perhaps taken at a concert, a kitchen performance, a quiet afternoon — but it has traveled far from that origin. The color has been amplified until it becomes its own atmosphere, a fever-warmth that is at once danger and desire, passion and enclosure. The figure floats within it, half-dissolved, half-radiant, his white shirt catching the only cool light in the entire canvas. This is the kind of painting that asks you to listen. The viewer becomes the audience to a performance that is almost over, or just beginning. Cicchetti hands you the beginning of the story, and the music — whatever it is — becomes yours to finish.