Sunbathing on the Balcony 2020

Valeria Duca’s painting, “Sunbathing on the Balcony,” captures a sun-drenched moment with thick strokes of blue, brown, and white oil paint. I'm drawn to the artist's intimate viewpoint, positioned high above the figure, as if peeking into a private moment of repose. The casual sprawl of the figure across rickety chairs evokes a sense of fleeting calm amid the chaos of everyday life. I imagine Duca, squinting in the sun, rapidly applying paint to capture the fleeting shadows and intense light. Did she mix those browns herself or squeeze them straight from the tube? I wonder if she spent the whole afternoon there trying to resolve the leg that reaches out to us on the left of the painting? The foot is so beautifully painted. The painting feels loose and unresolved, like a memory half-forgotten. This speaks to a larger conversation among painters, from Bonnard to Fairfield Porter, who find beauty in the ordinary and imbue fleeting moments with a sense of timelessness. It’s this embrace of ambiguity that keeps me coming back to painting, where meaning is never fixed, but always in flux.