Phoebe Hoban reviews an exhibition of paintings by Chantal Joffe at Cheim & Read, New York, on view through June 22, 2012.

Hoban writes: "The in-your-face impact of [Joffe's] paintings comes as much from scale as technique. These are big blowups of women, exaggerated and poster-like. There is no visible brushwork or impasto – instead there are obvious drips. It is in these drips, casual yet deliberate, random but not really, that Joffe's latent expressionism lurks. Oddly, one of Joffe's strengths is her sense of purposeful restraint. She is to painting what Raymond Carver is to short stories: an expert minimalist. While employing more detail in her approach to portraiture than Alex Katz, whose legacy she also clearly inherits, she refrains from full-blown realism, implying rather than mirroring reality."