"Heavy Painting," Spike Art Quarterly, Issue 33 (Autumn 2012): 76-85.

It begins with a kiss. Not a polite kiss, nor one soft and yielding, but the humid, self-obliterating kind, the heavy kiss of heavy tipplers at the end of a long night. In the recent paintings of American artist Nicole Eisenman, these ponderous embraces have grown from an occasional motif in her work to a full-blown theme. They show up in the interlocked profiles of Springtime Kiss (2011), all pink-nosed passion surrounded by a bluish jubilee of piney landscape, and in the tender, crapulent Sloppy Bar Room Kiss (2011), where the lovers limply lock lips before a few empty bottles with their heads slumped on the barroom table. They kiss languidly, wearily, with total surrender. ...

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