At Andrew Rafacz, Jaqueline Cedar’s Slide delivers small paintings with big temporal ambition. In her first Chicago solo show, the artist captures time not as a line but a loop—blurred, fragmented, and thick with atmosphere. Figures flicker in and out of clarity; gestures repeat like memories misfiring. The intimacy of scale invites close-contact peering, while layered forms resist quick comprehension. It’s a slow burn of perceptual dissonance, pitched somewhere between deep dreaming and déjà vu. In many ways, Cedar paints observation itself—its rhythms, glitches, and gaps—inviting us to dwell in the space between glancing and seeing.
In one intriguing painting, Wade, a stocky, bald man, slowly ambles from the wavy, white-threaded cerulean and aqua ocean waters toward the shore. His high-contrast shadow gives the work a surreal solemnity, reinforced by the jet-black sky in the background. It’s hard to determine whether it is day or night, dream or nightmare. It is, instead, some place right in between—seen but not spoken, felt but never forgotten.
In another work, Dive, Cedar brightens her palette, setting the scene in a uniform pool-floor blue. Here, five figures descend to the left between lane lines from an unseen concrete coping, heading below rope floats that frame the painting’s edge. The reiterated, long, lean, suited women’s bodies elegantly divide the canvas diagonally. While perhaps a scene snatched from the artist’s exercise routine—or a stark still from a competitive televised event—the canted, cropped view disorients ever so slightly, keeping the focus on the unity and harmony among the swimmers. Its overall concord and quiet almost belie the show of strength the figures effortlessly represent.
With neat restraint and atmospheric depth, Cedar makes a compelling case for ambiguity as an expressive force. What she offers isn’t mere narrative but resounding sensation: the echo of a body in motion, the shadow of a half-formed thought. In doing so, she reanimates the act of looking—not as a means to an end, but as a mode of present-tense living, charged with the drama of duration.
Slide is a quietly stirring reminder that painting—at its best—can still catch the drift of lived time, not by pinning it down but by letting it hang in the air a little. There’s nothing flashy here, just an uncanny sense of the familiar made strange: bodies half-present, spaces that feel remembered more than recorded, moods that pool like weather. Cedar paints like someone listening intently to the low hum beneath perception, coaxing it to the surface. The effect is modest but profound—like realizing, mid-thought, that you’ve forgotten what day it is, and loving every last bit of that feeling.
About the writer: Stephen Wozniak is an arts writer and exhibiting artist based in Los Angeles who has written feature articles, exhibition reviews and conducted interviews for the Observer, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Artillery, The Baltimore Sun, Art Spiel and other publications. He has also written critical essays for major commercial galleries and museum exhibition catalogs. To learn more: www.stephenwozniakart.com. Visit on Instagram: @stephenwozniakart.
Jaqueline Cedar: Slide at Andrew Rafacz
1749 West Chicago Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622
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