
Rochelle Dinkins, who has work hanging at ArtForms Gallery, however, is not young. She has been painting heavily patterned narrative cartoon fantasies for years. And the work has less to do with manga, underground comics or superheroes, and more to do with fairytale illustrations of princesses and castles, and with archetypal themes of birth, resurrection, personal relationships amidst exterior and interior forces like love, hate and death. But everything gets filtered through a romantic, ’60s flower-child kind of patterning and and sweetness (left top, “Magic Vessels,” oil on linen, 44″ x 68″).

They are feminine cartoons, from a woman’s point of view of life among the women in kitchen or the oda or some other domestic, female compound. Male presences are small. Even the heraldic monsters seem to come from a feminine, or at least child-like, viewpoint. The paintings as well as drawings are narrative, and remind me of the Unicorn Tapestries in their reference to some medieval yet made-up time and place, and in their use of close-to-the-picture-plane space. And they are mysterious. Why does this pregnant woman have two adults–one male, one female–nested in her womb? I can make up a million stories about this, and probably none of them would be the artist’s story (left, “Mama and her Treasures,” on paper, 29″ x 21″).

The work is definitely not in the mainstream. But it’s signature work of a specific artist. Dinkins, by the way, had a Fleisher Challenge about 15 years ago. I’m glad to see her work again.
In the back room, paintings by Robert Minervini take a deadpan, stiff-figured approach to bodies covered with suits or plastic. The work, which is not yet fully developed, communicates constriction and weirdness, and I’m interested in seeing where it goes (right, “Money Green”).