Marina Rheingantz

Marina Rheingantz’s paintings and embroidery are nourished by the recollection of Brazilian landscapes, memories of the compactness of the earth, of light and its variations, of the atmospheric nebula of twilight, of the pointillist dissemination of birds in the sky, of the emergence in clusters of flowers and shrubs, of mounds emerged on the surface of the flooded plains… Painting landscapes, today, cannot be envisaged without the awareness of the incongruity and the inactuality of such subject. Painting landscapes cannot depart from the conviction that such a subject – historically exhausted – can still be tackled, especially if one keeps in mind a banality that it is always good to remember, namely that a painting is first of all the story of a look at something: the painting tells how the painter’s gaze landed on his subject before placing it on its support. What we see of Marina Rheingantz’s landscapes are not the landscapes themselves but a singular look at these expanses, the way she sees them with memory, in the leafing of plans and patterns, the aerial dives of expanses without horizon strewn with suspended patterns, agglomerates of light, dust, phosphenes, clouds of microscopic ephemera, spangled with particles of reality frozen in appearance and yet always moving. The gaze is brought to a halt, stopped in its surveying by the resistance of the paint, by the compactness of its surface, by the web of patterns and signs that dot the areas and are superimposed on them like openwork filters.