Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim might have been presaging the paintings of Denise Orzo when he wrote, "The monster a child knows best and is most concerned with is the monster he feels or fears himself to be." Orzo's recent series of work features schoolgirls in often frenzied motion—schoolgirls on the run; schoolgirls with multiple faces, as if shaking their heads in defiance; schoolgirls with hair braids tied together in a ring; schoolgirls with legs akimbo, arms windmilling—as if the girls were attempting to distract themselves from some (inner?) demon.

The layered encaustic medium Orzo uses acts as a distortion device, however, and the figures in her paintings seem trapped in wax, like bugs in amber caught mid-flight. Orzo believes encaustic possesses an edgy energy. "The medium lends itself to making things look crazy," she says.

While Orzo confided that "kids can be scary and mean and startlingly violent," her depictions of schoolgirls explore the essential duality of childhood, what Orzo calls the "inno-sinister" nature of kids, "When you watch kids play, they have their own logic. Kids can be manipulative and destructive and innocent and helpless."

Orzo had a solo exhibition at Kingston's Wright Gallery in April. Tomfoolery is being exhibited as part of the group show "Encaustic Works 2005" at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz (co-curated by Chronogram art critic Beth E. Wilson), through December 11. (845) 257-3844.