Most focus on depictions of elaborately beaded purses, bejeweled costume necklaces, plush fur swatches, or fragments of sequined dressesβall vintage personal objects commonly associated with the feminine, ornamentation, and the body. Others, in a related series, concentrate on art historical portraits of women; projecting an equally demure sensibility, these latter works are either recreations of postcards of iconic Old Master paintings or are paintings based on drawings by the French Neoclassical artist Jean August Dominique Ingres.
Regardless of the depicted subject, every example requires that we get up close, in intimate proximity, to really see them. And, what we discover there is startling. Our modes of looking decelerate as the brain grapples with mixed messages about textures commingling with temperatures, shadows with light.
Her paintings direct our vision, even as they transform it, provoking a dramatic slowness of seeing that is a welcome refuge. Every bead, sequin, or wisp of fur is painted by Gitman individually, through a one-to-one transposition, with patience, meticulousness, and, one might suspect, even a touch of alchemy.
There is a bit of ineffable magic to her paintings, an illusionistic transubstantiation. A cold hardness is conveyed in one, a cozy warm softness in another, as our optical signals spill over into the tactile senses.
Such scrambled kinesthetic reactions provoke a second shift of understandingβan unexpected bait-and-switch. Set dispassionately against vaguely monochromatic, neutral backgrounds, they brandish a rather thorough disregard for the viewer, amplified by the practically audacious level of virtuosic skill.
