She Keeps Score by Jacob Gitane

Reaching into my pocket for the familiar cardstock weight of Spirits, I resolve to chance the heat outside the café. First I greet the artist Lola from the other side of the café counter. At present she’s daylighting as the shop’s barista, casting an eye, tone, and air of stoicism that must have come imported with the Himalayan coffee beans. She accepts my gesture with a nod, and I greet the Chico sunlight:

For the yet un-hazed, Chico, California is a college-art-farm-forest-gossip town about an hour and a half north of Sacramento. Non-Californians might guffaw that anything exists north of the capital that doesn’t hug Oregon, but I promise you it’s there! And in spite of a topography spanning less than 35 square miles and a 3-hour’s distance from the bay where Kerouac and Ferlinghetti put finger to typewriter, Chico presently exudes an air of romantics and poetry you can imagine of any historical “movement town.” Or so we tell ourselves, which does count for something.

Someone said of Tolkien’s Shire that you could acquaint yourself with that town and people within a month and learn everything, everyone worth knowing. They also said that after decades spent there and gone and back again, that magical little nook in the world could still offer surprises. And they were right.

They could say the same of Chico. In 2017, one might speed by streets with arborary names like Chestnut, Ivy, Oak, and Olive without casting a second glance. In 2022, one might be invited by a friend to stroll along these avenues to find an art studio on Chestnut, performance artists on Ivy, a grassroots musical stage space on Oak, and a cabin full of beatniks making weekly mischief and poetry on Olive. It is all as speakeasy as it sounds. Including this publication that you’re reading. Including the café and display in question, and including the artist who hovers and observes it all.

Naked Lounge sits neatly within downtown Chico, about 3 songs-drive away from anything in town that matters. It usually takes me about 2 songs played over the café speakers to pretend I’ve absorbed a given Naked Lounge display. Lola’s art has stolen albums of time from me–or who-knows-how many packs of Spirits if we were in a more civilized era that allowed indoor smoking. The sun steals days, and I’m suddenly at the Saturday night artist’s reception, where a stampeding crowd tries steering me toward a painting with a hypnotist’s spiral, labeled “Face the Void.” I do on the daily, and thus I continue, past a detailed portrait of a rogue perched in a cozy-cluttered dining corner. Everything is rendered in electric blue. One recalls a certain Pablo’s most morose period and wonders if there are similar emotional affinities. I forget the painting’s name, but I’m ok with it. The sense of settled sadness will stick with me.

I’ll pretend I can measure “Fragmentation of Self” by eye and estimate this offering as a 5x6 multi-colored abstraction on black canvas. The wavy but obviously calculated linework implies that contrapposto of a person in some state of inexpressible distress. Maybe our oppressive habit towards facial pareidolia further suggests a few faces in the mix. Are we seeing multiple personae, each with their own distinctive palette and (maybe absent) expression, vying for air at the top? Their neighbors a painting called “Time and Space,” which introduces itself as “Fragmentation’s” sister painting, mirroring medium, color palette, and all. This one more plainly depicts two humanoids (still in abstract) caught embracing each other with spindly, mobius-linked arms. It is a tender act? The lack of facial details makes the embrace feel slightly aggressive, and the aesthetic similarity to its sister doesn’t seem to leverage any answers…

I continue on, past another pair of sibling paintings, appropriately titled “Dichotomy,” parts 1 and 2. Each piece’s figure faces away from the other, in either yoga pose or interpretive dance move. Their limbs stutter in motion as though they were caught by a slow-exposure camera. The tastiness of their shapes and color blocking settled in days ago, as did their seeming debt to Fernand Léger’s more tasteful sensibilities, and so I continue on to another pair of paintings called “Integrations” 1 and 2.

I ponder the value of the comparisons to artistic canon that I’ve been privately surmising; one can wax on for albums Lola’s similarities to the geometry of Braque, or the intentional obliqueness of Duchamp. One can extrapolate the influence of Varo’s lush dreamscapes, or the technical versatility of the titan-painter famously called an “asshole” through song by someone also skulking this reception.

But if you were a so-called critic, would you waste your time with that if you feel you’ve eaten, held court, and shared love in versions of the spaces the artist is depicting? When you feel you can discern the contrapposto of the gilded trumpet player in this painting, or the bored but comfortable woman at the bar in that painting… When you can remember the time of year and its aroma that “The First Supper” are approximating with an ache of recognition, comparisons become reductive.

Does the man over my shoulder underneath a Coors hat have an equally sentimental connection to the faces in “Integration?”

“I do like what I’m seeing…” he trails, “I like the composition. And the negative space below left for those words–‘ME. I will always love you. Siempre para siempre…’ nothing too specific past that.”

We can get into specifics. It might be long-past time for specifics; those like Lola’s mastery in rendering. Lie to me and say you can tell what stroke was done by brush, which by blade. Keep lying and say you can deconstruct which shades of paint were mixed to achieve the impossible color wheels of even the most straightforward painting.

Explain to me how someone anywhere in their 20’s can possess such a strong hold of color blocking fundamentals. Does Lola’s artist statement offer any clues?

“Born in Maui, raised on a remote cattle ranch, and schooled in Chico, Lola translates her thoughts and experiences into fantastical and unique representations of life.”

No argument there.

The statement mentions a forthcoming attendance at a famous art university in Barcelona. Absolutely deserved, and catch her while you can, I guess.

The reception is held on the night of the week people my age usually play and fight after dark. Extremely talented musicians are set to start about halfway through, but I hurry to make my peace with the exhibit and its gawkers before any of that starts–the live music will most certainly be colorful, but Lola’s palette is adequately vivid, and the tunes they independently evoke suit me well enough: I wonder if the person with the baby bump across the room also hears a staccato house beat when they look at the painting placed conspicuously above a storage door. Would the bass drop following the sexy but anxiety-inducing silence sway the fellow under a Bud Light hat who stands squinting at “God is Not Fun or Cute?” His grimace at the accompanying price tag suggests an answer.

I wonder if anyone gets it–if anyone else looks at “Integration,” the original and its sequel, and sees the faces that color Lola’s palette. I’m not disheartened if not, but I hope the ambient bodies–and the silent creative forces they may house–stick around enough, play around enough to recognize that the art they’re witnessing represents a dreamscape version of the places and people they walk past every day in Chico. Can they tell they’re in the presence of the city’s silent curator of shared experience? Lola is a magnificent gargoyle of a presence, every spoken word honoring the ennui inscribed onto her paintings. She will be a monolith of contemporary art, and I hope to god this is felt by you, your mother, and the woman who walked into Naked Lounge with a Starbucks cup and a screaming child.

I step outside and singe my eyebrow while re-lighting a once-puffed smoke I replaced before entering the café. Back inside, there’s a table filled with reception-exclusive picture-framed pieces. “Joe’s Cigarette” catches my eye: a frame-pressed, only half-eaten cigarette. Lola knows Joe. I know Joe. Chico knows Joe, a brilliant artist in his own right. And anyone who knows Joe and our rivalry for tobacco consumption can enjoy the succinctness of storytelling within this seemingly simple artifact.

I almost buy the piece, but something about that feels perverse. Like any further temptation to dissect the work would only erode things from here. Haven’t I gone too far already?

I allow myself just one question of the artist before I make leave. It’s a lot like one I’ve been asking strangers.

“What happens when you create?”

She ruminates for only a moment.

“… Silence… for once.”

Then, finally, she grants an expression that complements her oeuvre as neatly as any choice of brush or shade of meridian.

A pursed, knowing smile.

Lola has been keeping record.