In reviewing her work, Holland Cotter, currently art critic for the New York Times, has written: Blanche Dolmatch’s scrupulously balanced “realistic” oils … have something of the eerie fascination of the phenomenon of identical twins. There is something endearing, even precious, and at the same time unnatural and psychologically unsettling. Indeed, Dolmatch employs this perfection of balance to cunningly disturbing ends. I say “cunningly” because the artist very obviously knows what she is up to; she understands the fascination (read : fear, perverse beauty} of the doppelgänger. Her show is as a whole initially disarmingly, unprepossessing. The painting is flat, gesturally meticulous and unadventurous; images line up with an almost preternatural symmetry. The human figure seldom appears — in fact, there is the architectural concentration, as bleak and chilling as Hopper. “Motel, for instance, is a night scene — three cabins stand, side by side but equally distanced, each identical in every detail, down to the half-drawn shades in the windows, all backed by a tangle of finely drawn tree branches, each lit by a single street light. The moon casts identical shadows from all three objects. The work — the objects — are crisp, clean, perfect and generalized. The tree branches should soften the composition but their perfection only increases the impression of a world frozen, static and isolated. We are in a twilight zone of forms which have every promise of being “alive” in a realistic sense, but are in fact in a world without movement or light. I return to Hopper: his world is laden with a sense of icy alienation. Dolmatch's view goes further to suggest that reality is a meticulously balanced metaphorical architecture of uninhabitable, unmoving forms. It is a chilling vision, both metaphorically acute, technically faultless, and visually enthralling. Motel_2.htmlMotel_2.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0

Statement

Paintings

Bio

Critique