Variations

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to announce Variations, an exhibition of new work by Jaq Chartier, on view from July 9 to August 29, 2026.

Chartier approaches painting as a process of testing driven by a deep curiosity and a desire to remain “at the edge” of what she does not yet know. For Variations, she revisits the parameters that have shaped her work for decades, pushing them into new territory. Working flat on meticulously prepared panels, Chartier uses an eyedropper to apply custom inks and dyes in bands, grids, and loosely organic forms that recall laboratory test strips, aerial topographies, cellular growth, and other magnified natural systems without ever settling into direct representation. Layers of spray paint and acrylic resin alter the image further, reactivating color and causing it to spread or separate. Vivid and distinctly alchemical, her exquisitely chromatic paintings are records of materials in motion, with color acting as not only an optical but a physical and emotional force.

In luminous compositions of repeating bands of saturated yellows and electric blues, lines dissolve, at intervals, into halos that appear to glow and vibrate against the white ground. The effect is both mesmerizing and meditative, recalling sound waves or atmospheric interference made visible. Moreover, the longer one looks, the less fixed the surfaces become. Edges soften, colors drift outward, and subtle shifts in density begin to accumulate, allowing new interpretations and emotions to unfold.

Another group of works introduces square forms created through an equally process-driven approach that plays with color and material in unexpected ways. Allowing ink to pool and settle around small geometric cubes, Chartier creates intricate formations that resemble microscopic ecosystems or crystalline structures. When enlarged and isolated, they reveal delicate striations, sedimentary edges, and chromatic separations that suggest distant cosmologies.


Chartier’s paintings are worlds to inhabit, not images to decode. She has compared them to immersive, ambient music that unfolds gradually through repetition and subtle variation, as color and scale generate changing rhythms and tonal effects. In this way, viewers are drawn into an experience that is as much physical as it is visual, one that is both felt and seen. Rather than settling into a fixed image, they remain open, influenced by the interplay between personal association and vibrating forms that seem to expand beyond the limits of the surface.

Jaq Chartier earned a BFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts in 1984 and an MFA in painting from the University of Washington in 1994. Her work has been exhibited in museums across the United States and Europe, including the Bellevue Art Museum; the Berkeley Art Museum; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Kunsthaus Center d’art, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum, Ahlen, Germany; the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Arts; the Seattle Art Museum; the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland; and Esbjerg Art Museum, Denmark. She has been reviewed in Art in America, Art NEWS, Artforum, New York Observer, San Francisco Chronicle, and Village Voice. She recently completed a public art installation at SeaTac International Airport. This is her fourth solo show at Dolby Chadwick Gallery.