The Brooklyn Rail

Engaging with centuries-old iconography and esoteric traditions, Elizabeth Colomba reconfigures these established visual languages not as acts of nostalgia but as critical interventions, transforming familiar tropes into potent, subversive forms. With roots in Paris and Martinique, formal academic training, and a cinematic sensibility shaped by years working in film, Colomba inserts Black women into the historical and mythical narratives from which they have long been excluded. Her meticulously rendered paintings and works on paper weave together classical iconography, allegory, and symbolism to offer counternarratives that are as conceptually rich as they are visually sumptuous. Her debut exhibition at Venus Over Manhattan serves as an incisive introduction to this vision, presenting new major works and drawings that exemplify the depth, complexity, and rigor of her practice.

While this refiguration of tradition is arresting, what ultimately draws one into Colomba’s canvases is their sly absurdity. Her compositions, though rigorously composed and historically referential, are laced with moments of surreal dissonance—details that unsettle, provoke, or delight. The first painting encountered in the exhibition, Orientalism — Plate 3 (2024), offers a preview of this process. Adopting the visual language of nineteenth-century Orientalist painting, Colomba turns the genre inside out. Two Black women in Regency-era dress occupy a lavish baroque interior tinged with Caribbean sensibilities. One sits composedly in an embroidered chair, reading, while her “pet”—a wild leopard—reclines beside her. On the table rests a coconut fitted with a straw, a playful stand-in for the exoticized accoutrements so often fetishized in colonial imagery. In the background, paintings within the painting echo works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, or Henri Émilien Rousseau, but their meanings have been cleverly inverted. Rather than reproducing exotic fantasies, Colomba uses their tropes to reveal the constructedness (and absurdity) of such visions. But even more absurd, perhaps, are the sitter’s expressions: the standing figure looks out at the viewer with an almost disgusted gaze, as if disapproving of the colonial spectacle in which she’s been cast—or of the viewer’s complicity in consuming it. Her glance breaks the illusion, injecting irony into the opulence and forcing a confrontation with the artifice of the scene.

On the opposing wall hangs a series of works on tea-stained paper—sketches intentionally aged to evoke archival relics, as if excavated from a forgotten history. Among the sketches is a portrait of Anna Albertine Olga Brown, also known as Miss La La, a celebrated performer at the Cirque Fernando in Paris—who stands beside a Parisian posting kiosk, one flyer prominently advertising her own performance. Another sketch reimagines the Greek mythological figure Antiope, recast as a Black woman. Here, as in almost all of her works, Colomba invites a traditionally excluded audience to envision themselves in iconic roles. But perhaps the most exciting work on paper is Colomba’s 157 Years of Juneteenth (2022), which was featured on the cover of The New Yorker in 2022, a striking watercolor that honors the legacy of emancipation.

In the main gallery hang Colomba’s impressive paintings—some housed in vintage Old Master-style frames. Each work is incredibly intricate, with every detail carefully researched and representative of Colomba’s deep engagement with art history. The Cockfight (2023) draws from a longstanding tradition in art, with references ranging from Jean-Léon Gérôme to Jan Steen. A Black woman in a Regency-era gown stands in the background as the scene unfolds around her. In the foreground, a table is in disarray, its teacup knocked over and a macaron reduced to crumbs, while two cocks fight mid-air, as if the sudden chaos has jolted her from her seat. Tropical foliage peeks through an open window, subtly infusing the European setting with Colomba’s Caribbean heritage. Nearby, Colomba depicts Mary Ellen Pleasant, a nineteenth-century entrepreneur, activist, and one of the first African American self-made millionaires, set in her home in San Francisco amidst all her books and possessions. A velvet coin purse lays on the floor, with gold coins spilling out, a classical motif to signify her wealth and social status.

Many of her works are inspired by the Major Arcana tarot cards, and in The Magician (2025), Colomba channels the card’s themes of transformation, mastery, and the power to manifest one’s will into the world. In this Afro-diasporic lens of the tarot, Colomba once again depicts a poised Black woman in period dress, standing in a lavish interior not unlike James McNeill Whistler’s “Peacock Room.” She’s caught mid-gesture, as she tosses an apple into the air—a moment suspended between action and intention. Her expression is unreadable yet resolute, quietly commanding the space around her. Around her, subtle symbols—an ouroboros necklace, an infinity-shaped tiara, a peacock in flight—discreetly infuse the scene with symbols of mysticism and ritual. Like the figure she depicts again and again, Colomba’s own practice is an act of conjuring: bringing histories into visibility, animating the margins, and transforming canonical forms into vessels of Black subjectivity and resistance. The Magician becomes a fitting emblem for the exhibition as a whole—an artist working between worlds, calling new possibilities into being.

By Rebecca Schiffman