14 November 2016
Movement is at the center of Patricia Reinhart’s new series of watercolor paintings. The movement of the paint along the surface of the canvas but also dramatic interior movements. The painting titles are allegories for the evolution of emotional states. The series of paintings which began in 2015 with Patience I – La Tempête / Tourmente continues into the present with Patience XV – Über die Notwendigkeit des Zerschmetterns.
The passage of color through light, the visible flows of water on the surface of the painting and the movements of the artist’s hand express the latent possibility of the organic form. In this matrix, shaped like a pattern of lines and space, arises a situation or a set of conditions in which something else develops. The weft of the linen canvas becomes visible with the pixilated grain that develops on the edges of the brushes of color.
The painting series Patience is a natural extension of Reinhart’s latest video project Anoir and the Woman in the Garden and features the same emotional landscapes and environments. The paintings in the Patience series are titled: L’Amour, L’Hiver, The Garden, La Forêt et le Ciel. Reinhart’s work is an intensely personal meditation on the figure of the woman embodied by the artist herself who is the actress in all her films. A meticulous layering of film stills, a technique she calls “cine-collage” allows her to bind still images together and to color film stills.
The poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire remarked that a woman’s hand viewed under a magnifying glass would create a perfect harmony of grey tones, blues, browns, greens, oranges and whites warmed with a bit of yellow. A true colorist might be able to translate these shifts in scale between our microperceptions and visible reality.
The two latest paintings in the series which have been selected for this exhibition, Patience XIV – Attitude / Das weibliche Rückgrat and Patience XV – Über die Notwendigkeit des Zerschmetterns, speak to the need for embodiment and transcendence as well as the passage of time.
Emmanuelle Day
With: Patricia Reinhart