Venice Beach

She's sitting at an outdoor café somewhere along a California boardwalk — Venice, perhaps, or somewhere equally drenched in that particular West Coast light that makes everything feel both real and slightly dreamed. Her grey hoodie is pulled up, her dark round sunglasses on, a coffee cup on the table in front of her. She is right there in front of you, and yet entirely her own person. She is not performing for the viewer. She is simply existing, and you have wandered into her moment. Nancy Cicchetti began with a photograph — as she always does — and then let the painting take over. The colors shifted, the background deepened, the figures moving along the promenade became suggestions of human life rather than specific people. The advertisement on the billboard to the left — a woman blowing a bubble, a phone, a posture of glamour — creates an ironic echo: the painted image of a woman selling something, and in the foreground, a woman who is selling nothing at all. It is a quiet, knowing counterpoint. This is a painting about being seen and being unseen. About the particular kind of solitude that exists in public places. Cicchetti has always believed that her job is to begin the story and let the viewer carry it forward — and here, she has laid out the opening sentence with extraordinary confidence. What happens next is yours to imagine.