Edward Hopper once said that, as an artist, the only thing he ever aspired to do was to paint “sunlight on the side of a house.” By that same token, the recent work of Beatriz Maliszewski can be seen as an attempt to paint the sunlight both inside and outside a house. Like much of her work, Beatriz’s newer paintings explore the interplay between color and composition over quotidian subjects; however, there is an unmistakable shift in Beatriz’s depiction of light.

In this series of paintings, light assumes a leading role, taking on a narrative in and of itself. While light is used conventionally to emphasize the contrast between inside and outside, foreground and background, it is also portrayed in a way that transcends its physical limitations: light becomes an object. It takes on a supernatural presence as it graces the intimate settings it illuminates. This is abundantly clear in paintings such as Allegory and Girls with Lemons where despite the human subjects, light is the focal point of the painting as it mixes verticals and horizontals with a dash of diagonals to give direction to the eye. Light becomes an imaginative narrative eliciting the viewer to consider it in a deeper and perhaps spiritual sense.