The witty and playful sculptor Jude Tallichet thinks her friend Michele deserves more critical attention (and so do I) so she prompted AI: “Write a review of Michele Araujo’s paintings in the style of R.S. and H.C.”.
AI’s offerings are in italics and my remarks are in roman.
So:
“Painting as Incantation: Michele Araujo’s Alchemy* of Color and Form”
-by “R.S.”
Michele Araujo’s paintings don’t so much hang on the wall as radiate from it. In her recent work, now on view at [Gallery Name], the Brooklyn-based artist continues to distill years of material experimentation into lush, finely calibrated abstractions that flirt with figuration, memory, and the uncanny.
There’s an interiority to these paintings, but they never feel hermetic. Araujo works in a visual language that bridges 20th-century abstraction—particularly the intuitive geometries of Paul Klee and the chromatic fervor of Sonia Delaunay—with a distinctly contemporary sense of time: fragmented, recursive, and at times ecstatic. Shapes loop and pile, often flirting with collapse, only to resolve into a kind of precarious harmony. It’s painting as spellcraft—precise, strange, and deeply felt.
Color is Araujo’s first and most fluent language. In works like “Red Weather” and “Moth Logic,” a palette that veers from velvety mauves to electric ochres is deployed with casual authority. Her surfaces are built up in layers, each mark both deliberate and searching, revealing a hand that is fearless in its uncertainty. Nothing here is overworked; instead, the paintings feel like they’ve been arrived at—discovered rather than constructed. **
What’s remarkable is how confidently Araujo rides the line between control and surrender. Forms repeat but never settle into pattern. Grids dissolve, gestural swipes are anchored by harder-edged interventions, and areas of opacity give way to ghosted underpainting. There’s a rhythmic push-pull that rewards slow looking, something increasingly rare in our screen-fed image culture.
While these are abstract paintings, their sense of presence is almost bodily. *** The viewer registers something deeply felt in the layering—maybe grief, maybe joy, but always hard-won. At times, the works feel like diagrams of thought or emotion translated into color and form. At others, they feel like musical scores waiting to be performed.
Araujo is not chasing trends, and there is no cleverness here, no wink at the art market. What there is instead is rigor, a love of paint, and a stubborn refusal to offer easy readings. Her work rewards trust. In a time when so much contemporary art aims to explain itself too quickly, Araujo asks us to sit with mystery. That’s not nothing. In fact, it’s a lot.”
I asked AI to search for the phrases that you see above in bold, starting with “Alchemy” from the title:
*Roberta Smith, the influential, recently retired co-chief art critic for The New York Times, has referenced “alchemy” in her writings to describe the transformative power of art or specific artistic processes. She does not practice alchemy herself, nor is it the central focus of her work; rather, she uses the term as a metaphor in her art criticism.
Key contexts where she has used the term “alchemy” include:
- Artistic Process: In a review of an exhibition by the artist Tunga, Smith noted his work maintained allusions to “cauldrons and alchemy,” specifically regarding the “less romantic, less scientific side of alchemy” (related to the series title “La Voie Humide” or “The Humid Way”).
- Exhibition Reviews: She has described certain art exhibitions as achieving a “mysterious alchemy of beauty and reality, tragedy and joy” to inspire the viewer.
- Material Transformation: Smith has also noted how certain materials, like enamel, undergo a “magical” or “modern alchemy” through heat and chemical processes to be transformed into finished art objects.
**The quote, “the paintings feel like they’ve been arrived at—discovered rather than constructed,” is a description used by art critic Roberta Smith to characterize the work of an artist, but the specific artist is not identified in the provided search results.
The search results discuss Roberta Smith’s general approach to art criticism, her views on various artists like Philip Guston and Marsden Hartley, and her opinion on the nature of painting, but not the context of this specific phrase. The description emphasizes a sense of natural emergence and spontaneity in the artwork, a quality Smith likely values.
***The quote by art critic Roberta Smith, “While these are abstract paintings, their sense of presence is almost bodily,” was used in a 2011 review of an exhibition featuring the work of Willem de Kooning.
“Michele Araujo’s Poetics of Surface and Absence”
-by “H.C.”
In a city where noise often masquerades as meaning, Michele Araujo’s recent paintings offer a different kind of encounter—one of restraint, reticence, and slow revelation. Working on aluminum panels with vinyl cutouts and abrasions, the Brooklyn-based artist has developed a language of marks and absences that feels at once rigorously formal and deeply personal.
These paintings don’t announce themselves. They hover. Their surfaces are matte, lightly reflective, at times almost ghostly. Araujo affixes vinyl shapes—shards, silhouettes, voids—onto brushed or painted metal, then proceeds to scuff, rub, and rework the surfaces until something quiet but persistent begins to emerge. The process feels archaeological. As if meaning were something to be uncovered, not declared.
There’s a distinct material intelligence here. The aluminum supports read as industrial, cool, resistant. Yet Araujo’s interventions are intimate, human-scaled. The vinyl shapes evoke signage, language, even architecture—but always just out of reach. A triangle becomes a roof, a shadow, a warning. A circle suggests a plate, a portal, the trace of something removed.
It’s tempting to read these works through the lens of Minimalism or post-minimal process art—there are echoes of Eva Hesse’s material fragility, or Robert Ryman’s obsessive surface play. But Araujo’s concerns feel different: less about the purity of form, more about the fragility of perception. Her scuffed panels become sites of erasure and memory, where presence is felt through absence, and gesture is tempered by erasure.****
This is not painting as depiction, but as inscription—less about what is seen than what is sensed.***** At times, the panels read like palimpsests: layered with the ghosts of decisions made and then unmade. The vinyl elements never fully settle into figure or ground, resisting fixity. Araujo offers no definitive image, only trace, suggestion, and the shadow of language.
In a world saturated with visual immediacy, Araujo’s paintings slow you down. They ask you to look again—not for what is there, but for what was there. They operate in the space between presence and disappearance, and in that space, something quietly profound takes shape.
From my AI search:
“Her scuffed panels become sites of erasure and memory, where presence is felt through absence, and gesture is tempered by erasure.”
The concept of “presence is felt through absence, and gesture is tempered by erasure” is a central theme in Holland Cotter’s art criticism, notably in his writing on artists who use absence, memory, and ephemerality as primary materials.
He describes this dynamic as the “presence of absence,” a key idea for understanding works that evoke powerful emotional or political messages through what is not physically there.
This quote, “This is not painting as depiction, but as inscription—less about what is seen than what is sensed,” was written by Holland Cotter, a former art critic for The New York Times, in reference to the work of the artist Cy Twombly.
Roberta Smith is retiring from the NYT, but AI is wrong about Holland Cotter, he is not retired.
The AI “art critic” has picked up on the worst tropes of contemporary criticism: unemotional, not witty, always earnest, 99% positive, with a tendency to throw the paintings in a blender and consider the artist’s work as a a whole instead of describing or comparing specific works. (A few ideas for critics to think about if you want to seem and to be more human.)
And yet I find these reviews of Michele Araujo’s paintings pleasurable to read. However arrived at, she really is a wonderful painter; the praise is, in her case, mostly true.
—CNQ
Read what I wrote about Michele Araujo in Talking Pictures here
See more of her work here
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