Brooklyn, NY
15 October 2005 17:05 PM
If Hana Cisnarova painted portraits not with oil on canvas but with camera on photo paper, her coloristic experiments might be easily chalked up to fun time with the color printer. (Push the magenta!) Yet the saturated burning magenta, wicked yellow, fiery orange, and searing turquoise that fill the frames and the people of her canvases are put there deliberately by her pop-sympathetic brush, a flat, charged hand that in its propensity to treat the same figures with different colors recalls Warhol’s silkscreen portraits of celebrities. The identity of Cisnarova’s subjects varies, though pictures of the artist as young girl likely derive from old school photos—their colors changed over time? Hung in multiple, the portraits form dynamic groupings, colorful cliques alive in their clashing and complementing.
—Lori Waxman