Children With no Name VI 2008

Carmen Delaco made "Children With no Name VI" with what looks like oil paint, and it’s all about the feel of making. The surface has this scraped, scrubbed quality, like Delaco was wrestling with the image. Colors are muted, almost ghostly – grays and whites with these fleeting touches of pink and green that give it this strange, tender quality. The child’s hands are all smudged together, but there's real emotion there. You can feel the weight of the child's vulnerability. It’s like Delaco is riffing on artists like Jenny Saville or maybe even a little bit of Francis Bacon, with that willingness to distort and mess things up in the pursuit of some kind of deeper truth. Art’s never really finished anyway, right? It’s just a conversation that keeps going.