Oakland-based oil painter Dorielle Caimi’s work offers Renaissance-reminiscent nude portraits in a startlingly bright color palette. Her subjects’ bodies betray their contemporary roots with sunburns or neon pubic hair. The images also incorporate objects and animals meant to scratch away the composure of the portrait, revealing the subject’s internal world.
In one eerie juxtaposition, a composed woman holds a fish to her chest, a desert in the background. In another, floral gold offers a background for a woman smearing lipstick on her cheeks. The faces of these women portray the tensions between their surface expressions and their emotional struggles. Caimi says her paintings “explore the relationship between grace and angst that both plague and glorify the private worlds of young women.”