Karen Mazzarella

oil on canvas Critical Review of Painting: “Nina's Coffee Café” January 31, 2008 Artist: Karen Mazzarella Reviewer: Joseph Di Bella, Distinguished Professor of Art, University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA When I saw this painting in its prominent location at the national competitive exhibit titled City Life/ Country Life at the Fredericksburg Center for the Creative Arts in November 2007, I was caught off-guard by its fragile interplay of solid, balanced design and disruptive imagery. Here is a piece that projects a certain level of familiarity in its setting and at the same time an uncanny strangeness of the same common elements. The tidy interior of a small town diner, all its component tables and chairs, light fixtures and other accoutrements in their places in a rapid perspectival movement from deep space into the viewer's frontal view, suddenly shifts into a clutter of newspapers with a table and chair off-kilter. The clue behind this departure from the prevailing neatness may be found on the back wall: 'Nina's is like a city bus--just because someone's next to an empty chair, it doesn't mean that chair is unavailable! Please share the tables. Thanks." Yet there is really no one to share tables. One solitary figure sits way in the back, his green shirt and bright red cap provide a complementary hue chord that accentuates the rest of the predominantly middle key composition. It is that one cockeyed table and chair at mid-ground that indicate the interior space was shared at one time, but its inhabitant is departed. The strong vertical form in the foreground, that simulation of a dominant representation of America, looms over everything else. We see the visual analogy between the folds of the figure's drapery and those of the newspapers stacked nearby. Then there is the analogy between but deliberate misalignment of the suspended ceiling lights and the uplifted illuminated torch perched on Liberty's upward extended arm, while her face becomes a cloaked silhouette in darkness. What we get here is a tentative sense of ease that breaks into a locked-in tension of massive to small, extroverted to introverted, looking up to looking down, partially anonymous and partially recognized. Despite the fluid action of edges and planes, and the enlivening accents of saturated colors amid cool and warm neutrals, there is only the hint of impending spring in a vase of budding branches and an exterior view of motionless vehicles. A pervasive stillness, an all-encompassing quietness, and a sense of alienation even within the most common and communal of environments recall similar statements of psychologically charged space in Edward Hopper's work.