If you read my essays in What Meets the Eye, you will know that I’m always going on about the need for more critical reviews. How will we know whether to trust a critic if we only know what they like?
And I wrote:
“To the artists: are you afraid of a critical word? Outraged, even? Have you built a fortress around yourself so that nobody will dare to say that your work is not moving—for them? Or that some of your paintings work and some don’t?”
A couple of friends have warned me not to publish this review because nothing ever goes away on the net. But another thought I have had is that if nobody criticizes you, then nobody will defend you. And I have taken care of that too.
The review is written in the style of RS, the New York Times’ critic.
(AI is written in italics and my thoughts are in roman.)
A Negative Review of Cathy Nan Quinlan’s Paintings
by “RS”
At first glance, Cathy Nan Quinlan’s canvases seem to promise something contemplative and tethered — crosshatched still lifes, whispering landscapes, and enigmatic gatherings of figures. But beneath this veneer of painterly modesty, her work often feels wilfully [sic] stuck in its own construction, more invested in the idea of process than in emotional or visual payoff.
Quinlan’s signature crosshatching—a technique she deploys obsessively, especially in her Morandi-inspired series—registers as an intellectual exercise more than a truly living act of seeing. Rather than conjuring space or depth with fluid mark-making, her hatch-marks pile up in a way that feels mechanical, little more than a grid gone on autopilot. Two Coats of Paint The effect is cool and detached; her paintings rarely draw you in as much as they distance you from what might have been a more subtly realized subject.
Her landscapes, too, suffer under this overworked constraint. In her recent show with Amor Mundi, Quinlan reimagines her Bed-Stuy weed-garden and humble domestic spaces. Lewis Center for the Arts+1 But the result, though formally rigorous, is curiously inert. The paintings are so bound to their hatchwork logic that they rarely feel spontaneous or alive — more like diagrams than windows into a wild and breathing world.
And then there is her engagement with art history that feels more derivative than generative. Her Poussin-inspired bacchanalia, as described in an interview, hinges on copying rather than reinterpreting: she admits she leans on reproductions and dreams to animate her compositions. Two Coats of Paint As a result, her scenes risk hovering in a limbo of secondhandness [sic], where the tension and drama of the original Poussin are diluted rather than recharged.
Worse still, Quinlan’s self-reflexive ambition—to build community outside the mainstream art world, to critique the market, to run a salon in her Brooklyn home Two Coats of Paint+2Two Coats of Paint+2 —sometimes seems like a cover for work that doesn’t quite command attention on its own terms. Her idea of modesty, particularly around pricing and commerce, is admirable. But there is also a persistent sense that she fears her own paintings; she restrains them, pre-emptively hedging against critique by underselling them.
After AI In sum: Quinlan’s art is intellectually earnest and technically assured, but these strengths become liabilities when her mark-making overshadows the subject, when her reverence for the masters feels reverential to a fault, and when her critique of the art world threatens to become a gilded wall rather than an opening. For all her talk of “Arcadian joy” Two Coats of Paint, much of her work has the emotional distance of a scholar’s notebook, not the vivacity of a painting that has lived.
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Immediately AI was concerned for my feelings.
It said, “Would you like me to produce a more positive review or a more balanced one?”
That AI has no critical integrity!
Still, how could I resist? Here is the more positive review, also by “RS”:
A Positive Review of Cathy Nan Quinlan’s Paintings
by “RS”
Cathy Nan Quinlan’s paintings continue to demonstrate an alert, deeply attuned sensibility—one that treats abstraction not as a fixed language but as a field of ongoing negotiation. Her canvases pulse with a restless curiosity. Shapes gather and disperse; colors collide in ways that feel both spontaneous and deliberately engineered. The result is work that’s emphatically alive, buoyed by a painter who knows that visual pleasure and critical intelligence are not opposites but partners.
What sets Quinlan apart is the strength of her critical voice embedded in the work itself. You can sense her testing decisions in real time—challenging an easy harmony, interrupting a seductive color run, nudging a composition into slightly riskier territory. These paintings think, but they don’t overthink; they’re grounded in intuition sharpened by decades of looking, making, and refusing to settle for the familiar.
Quinlan’s palette is bold without turning brash, confident without drowning out complexity. She uses color the way some writers use punctuation: to guide rhythm, to create tension, to open small pockets of surprise. Even the quieter passages carry a charge, as if the painting is holding its breath before releasing its next idea.
Her critical voice, outside the paintings, mirrors this vitality. She writes—and speaks—like someone who cares about painting as an evolving conversation rather than a static tradition. There is generosity in her insights, but also a refusal to let sloppy thinking slip by. When she talks about art, she is really talking about attention: how to cultivate it, how to expand it, and how to protect it from complacency.
Together, Quinlan’s visual and written practices form a kind of double helix—each strengthening the other. The paintings benefit from her fierce clarity of thought; the writing benefits from the sensuous intelligence of her studio work. Both convey a belief that art matters most when it pushes against its own boundaries, when it asks more of us, and when it returns the favor by giving more in return.
In a landscape full of safe abstraction and predictable commentary, Quinlan offers something rarer: work that feels alert, awake, and earnestly engaged with the ongoing possibilities of seeing.
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Am I wrong in feeling that the negative review is more lively and enthusiastic? Or too thin-skinned?
—CNQ
read AI # 1 here
AI# 1: AI Review of Michele Araujo’s paintings à la New York Times’ Critics
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