Spritz - Virginia Cohn Parkum, c. Unknown

At first glance, Spritz can read as almost playful: a pale, airy field; a few bold blocks of color; the suggestion of a face drawn in quick, searching lines. The title nudges the viewer toward something casual—summer, soda, a quick refresh. Parkum uses that expectation against us. The “spritz” here is not frivolous. It’s chemical. It’s state force delivered as mist.

The composition is built around a self-portrait that refuses to settle into a stable likeness. Her face floats at the upper left, lightly sketched and partially erased, as if visibility itself is threatened. One eye is widened, the other softens into haze; the mouth is present but tentative. Rather than sculpting features with density, Parkum lets the white ground wash through them, which makes the portrait feel exposed—both physically, in the sense of being hit by tear gas, and psychologically, in the sense of being stripped of control over one’s own body.

Across the right side, a dark, gloved form interrupts the softness. It reads as an arm in uniform, or at least an arm made anonymous by gear—thick, black-green, and angled with purpose. Near it, the green cylindrical shapes evoke canisters: blunt, industrial objects that do not belong to the human scale of a face. Parkum stages these forms like props of authority, but she paints them without fetishizing detail. They’re simplified into unmistakable silhouettes—tools rather than individuals—so responsibility stays systemic. The violence in the image isn’t a fist; it’s procedure.

Color carries much of the narrative. The painting is dominated by whites and cool, clinical blues and greens—tones that can feel “clean” until you realize they echo the aesthetics of equipment, containment, and control. Then there are the red shapes near the bottom: not descriptive blood, but hot punctures that break the façade of neutrality. They work like alarms inside the composition—small, undeniable flashes of harm and urgency.

The most pointed move is the title. Parkum’s Spritz is bitterly comic: a word for perfume, cocktails, or a light splash, repurposed to name an act of policing that targets breath, eyes, skin. That dissonance matters. It exposes how institutions often sanitize what they do with language—“dispersal,” “non-lethal,” “crowd control”—as if the right phrasing can launder pain. By choosing her own euphemism, Parkum doesn’t soften the act; she spotlights the way softness gets used as camouflage.

In the broader arc of her work—where bodies are frequently misshapen, pressured, or caught in moral emergency—Spritz is notable for how much it withholds. Instead of dramatizing suffering through expressionistic distortion alone, Parkum stages a kind of enforced blankness. Tear gas doesn’t just injure; it erases. It turns a person into a set of reflexes: blinking, coughing, disoriented, trying to locate air. The painting’s large white passages don’t feel like peace; they feel like occlusion—visibility blown out, senses overwhelmed, memory turning patchy at the edges.

Seen this way, Spritz becomes a self-portrait about the politics of the body: whose bodies can be safely present in public, whose breath can be interrupted, and how quickly a personal face becomes a targetable silhouette. Parkum doesn’t ask for pity. She records the encounter and makes the viewer sit with its absurdity—the childish ease of the title versus the hard apparatus of control—until the irony curdles into clarity. The “spritz” is the point: not a splash of life, but a weaponized mist that turns a citizen’s most basic act—breathing—into something contingent.