Tucson Weekly
Volume 14, Number 30
September 25-October 2, 1997

Lorraine Inzalaco beautifies female flesh, celebrating every curve and crevice in the bodies of women in sunny paintings that radiate a joyous sexuality. Inzalaco drench her works in a lesbian eroticism that she says has gotten her censored in the past: In painting after painting her naked women lustily embrace, or lie sated post-orgasm on tousled bed. But her high-spirited hush paintings are highly shocking-

Some 40 works- paintings in oil, paintings on paper, charcoal drawings- have spilled out into the restored WomenKraft Gallery like lush fruits out of a prodigious cornucopia. Everywhere is lovely female flesh, from the yellow and lavender hips of "Beautiful Mnasidice," Inzalaco's slightly fauvist version of Goya's "Maya," to the ripe peach breasts of the recumbent "Inspiratress" and the tangled limbs of the sated women in "Duo."

Inzalaco's aim in putting all these women to canvass is partly political. She wants her show, Visible for a Change, to bring lesbian love out into the open and to change prejudice against it. But apart from "Coming Out," a slightly chunky painting showing the artist running toward an open door, these artworks are not particularly didactic. And though Inzalaco intends her as a challenge to the social (and art) order, she uses a deliberately accessible, even conservative style. Her women don't subvert conventional notions of female beauty: They're young and pleasingly plump. For the most part they're skillfully rendered in brushstrokes that reveal an almost old fashioned love of color on color. Inzalaco experiments with the once-radical but still lovely painting techniques of the Impressionists all the way up to the Expressionists, clearly revealing in the feel of the loaded brush against the yielding canvas.