Growing up in Detroit, Alicia Czechowski had access to the superb collection ofthe Detroit Institute of Arts. At the age of ten she did her first copy of a painting,a still-life by Pieter Claesz, rendered on a reduced scale in colored pencil. She later did full scale oil copies, or details of paintings, by Frans Hals, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean Siméon Chardin, Thomas Gainsborough, Anthony Van Dyke,Diego Velasquez, Henri Fantin-Latour, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in the National Gallery and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.The artist says of the experience of copying the masters: “Being at work with your brushes and colors in front of a living, breathing painting by one of the greats, like Hals or Velasquez, is the most potent learning experience. It’s the best way to learn to paint, almost like journeying back in time and actually watching them at work at their easels.” Her appreciation of artists like the Dutch Golden Age Still Life Painters is evident in her quotation of the philosopher,Schopenhauer, who said that the artists “direct such purely objective perception to the most insignifi cant objects, a lasting document of their objectivity and spiritual peace in paintings of still life, the aesthetic beholder does not contemplate them without emotion.”

Based on her formal and informal training, the Old Masters are foundational to Czechowski’s paintings. The artist does not merely quote them, but often inserts a female subject in her works, not to mention herself as a female artist.As a result, Czechowski changes the power dynamic of the gaze, from male to female. In a Memento Mori that appears on the artist’s web page, Czechowski represents herself, sagging flesh, wrinkles, and thinning hair. She looks out of the picture space while behind her a skull projects beyond her face, cold, with hollow eyes and a toothless protruding jaw. The artist looks at the viewer directly, and smiles slightly, defiant in the face of death. Compare Czechowski’swork to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill from 1628 by Pieter Claesz: “In this still life, close observation and realistic detail operate in tension with explicit symbolism. The toppled glass, gap-toothed skull, and guttering wick of an oil lamp all serve as stark symbols oflife’s brevity. Working with a limited palette of grays and browns, Claeszcarefully describes the surfaces of these unsettling objects. By arranging them on a pitted stone ledge, the artist connects the picture’s space to our own,making the message all the more compelling.

Czechowski paints an image entitled La Maja Desnuda, a direct reference to the 1797-1800 masterpiece, Maja desnuda (nude maja) by Francisco de Goya in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain. Goya paints a work that conforms to the traditions of the Spanish nude, but it breaks with them in significant ways,particularly in the sitter’s bold gaze. The accompanying picture, Maja vestida(clothed maja), makes it clear that Goya is not representing a mythological subject, such as Venus, rather, he has painted a lower-class Spanish woman.Goya’s Maja desnuda is known for the woman’s direct and unashamed gaze and her explicitly sexual demeanor. The artist upends assumptions about what a nude should be in Maja desnuda. The painting was controversial, political,and the target of censorship linked to a mob that demanded the removal of the prime minister, Manuel de Godoy, the owner of the picture.

In contrast, Alicia Czechowski’s La Maja Desnuda’s provenance is a Barbie doll. It is clear by the pose of the painted doll—arms behind the head, andchest, pelvis, and legs rotated toward the viewer--that it echoes Goya’s Maja desnuda. Unlike the Spanish maja, her gaze is a bit askance, not directly engaging the viewer, and decidedly not seductively as in Maja desnuda. As in Goya’s painting, the bedding is blue and white but painted with broad, flat strokes and without the intricate detail of boudoir fi nery Goya provides. The same treatment of paint covers the figure’s body. It reveals the brushstrokes,and the paint is flat, dark, and mottled as if to obscure the viewer’s visual access to the figure’s body compared with the whiteness and smoothness of the paint that renders the Spanish maja’s skin visually accessible. The visible joints of the Barbie make it possible for the doll to imitate the position of themaja. However, the toy is not really able to replicate the Spanish maja’s position. Is she posed to provide visual and sexual pleasure which is the main goal of Goya’s maja? It seems that the answer is unclear. The workings of LaMaja are laid bare for those who look closely. Even as the artist quotes the Old Masters, she turns expectations of the painting on its head. Ultimately, her La Maja Desnuda is equivocal. But Czechowski has mastered the Masters.

Czechowski has executed another work that also owes something to the Masters, but that is ultimately uniquely her own. Woodnymph, a pastel from 1980, at the David Barnett Gallery, hearkens ever so slightly to Manet’s Olympia in the woman’s crossed feet and straight legs and to Sargent in her sumptuous black vest. Czechowski is a masterful draftsman with pastels, rendering form, color, light, and texture with precision. Unlike Olympia, however, her posture is open, even as her gaze is averted from the viewer. She appears to be on display in her finery, but she accepts the viewer’s gaze casually. She is recumbent in a lawn chair; her body pitched slightly forward in the recliner into the viewer’s space encouraging an almost nonchalant survey of her, except she is insistently there. Adorned with flowers in her hair and wrapped in a diaphanous fl oral garment and printed stockings(or perhaps tattoos?) that reference Edgar Degas’ ballet and theatre costumes,the woodnymph is on display, but she does not appear to be either coy or confrontational. Rather than the embodiment of a woodland fairy, this woodnymph appears to be dressed up—wearing a costume. However, this woodnymph is a woman, without the awkwardness of so many Degas ballerinas and is self-possessed even as the viewer’s scrutiny falls upon her on her garden-store throne. She is highlighted by the blended pastel background that surrounds her, which accentuates her costume. Czechowski’s Woodnymph is less a mythical fi gure who lives in a forest than a fully embodied woman sitting on a garden chair.

Teresa Olabuenaga, born in Mexico City, is an artist who asserted that her workrevolves around four basic themes: childhood, loneliness, death, and the innerworld. Her artistic practice is rooted in expressionist and conceptualapproaches. The artist has experience with painting, handmade paper,printmaking, object art, and mixed media techniques. Olabuenaga’s work, El Gozo en el Recuerdo (The Pleasure in Memory) from 1999 in the David Barnett Gallery, examines the nature of memory, desire, and an inner dream world.

However, the artist obscures the work’s meaning, demanding a closer reading.Olabuenaga’s work is conceptually dense and experimental, containingseemingly unrelated elements. On the right and left side of the top of the work,the artist incorporates four fish. The presence of fish in the history of art is vastand has many interpretations. In particular, Dutch still life and genre artists included fish in their works, and they carried a variety of meanings. Notably, fish have been understood as the embodiment of the desires of the flesh. This reading concurs with other elements in this work. The central axis of the work contains a wealth of visual information that recalls memory and desire. The artist adds Mexican cultural objects: four small gold hearts. The hearts, typically made of tin, although rooted in Catholic tradition, representing the Sacred Heart of Jesus, have evolved into symbols of deep passion, love, and protection within Mexican culture. Directly above and below the topmost heart, appear two black and white collaged reproductions of Antonio da Correggio’s Renaissance painting, Jupiter and Io, from around 1530. Correggio’s work was commissioned by Duke Federico Gonzaga II of Mantua and was inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The likenesses of Jupiter and Io Olabuenaga uses are one-off, seemingly re-printed on newsprint, slightly obscuring the clarity of the image. This obfuscation works to recall the imperfect nature of memory and reflects the image’s title, El Gozo en el Recuerdo (The Pleasure in Memory).