Eva Kozlowski
Greenline Cafe
4239 Baltimore Ave.
Philadelphia
April 16, 2025
I was banging my head against my computer screen at my local coffee shop as I do most mornings when something caught my peripheral attention: The art on the walls had changed overnight.
All winter long, Greenline Cafe on Baltimore Avenue had been showing the same collection of odd paintings for sale. My inane remote work days full of procrastination and overloaded caffeine consumption chugged on without fail under Greenline’s roof, but as spring unfolded outside, so did a solo show by artist Eva Kozlowski erupt indoors.
Kozlowski’s pastel oil paintings easily capture the subdued facade of early springtime. Her subjects are butterflies, anatomic florals, and meditative moments of abstraction. The common theme is the transience of metamorphosis.
Modern life can feel like swimming in an ashtray of pushed papers. It’s hard to conceptualize how couched between the most mundane moments are constant case studies of awesome transformation. That includes all the usual clichéd suspects: caterpillars destroying and rearranging their DNA inside cocoons while retaining past life memories; monks altering their brain structure through meditation; cherry blossoms flowering.
These are all hazy translations of form that are permanently astonishing because of how hard they are to hold down; these changes happen in private, internally, regardless of witnesses. Kozlowski manages to communicate the translucent power of alteration through loose line work that crawls through her images like knowing vines; gradient sunset colors that mirror the daily shift of planets; and shadowy, overlapping forms that infer the confused passage of time.
Those traits are seen in “Wanderer,” which illustrates a person crouched in their own meandering thoughts, and “Butterfly Room,” an equally abstract barrage of colors packed into the familiar form of four moth wings. The light oils used to color the canvas almost give the appearance of dyed cloth or tissue paper.
Coffee shop art isn’t known for being good. It’s usually akin to when dentists hang tacky landscapes of local vistas in their waiting rooms. But Greenline has a special, Kafka-esque effect happening in its latest exhibit.
The paintings are unilaterally buoyant and pretty. Beneath them are the tables where disgruntled laptop workers join the unemployed and often unhoused members of the neighborhood in trying to get through another day of lonely angst. The coffee shop is a hub of community; it’s also a one-room display of absurd alienation. It's reminiscent of Gregor Samsa's bedroom.
With Kozlowski’s reflections all around, the overpriced routine of daily cold brew has developed into its own kind of chrysalis.
