Marina Rheingantz (b. 1983) currently lives and works in São Paulo, but she grew up in the rural region of Araraquara. The diverse and magnificent landscape of her youth is still an important source of inspiration for her artistic practice. There is a rich tradition of landscape painting in Brazil, but Rheingantz’s works stand out because they also reveal the country’s industrialization and modernization.

Marina Rheingantz always works from memory. The photographic recordings she makes on location serve purely as mnemonics. She creates the landscapes she wants to (re)visit, but they always seem to be under construction. Her work is not about the pure reconstruction of a landscape, but about revealing the course of the viewing experience. The work Mirror, for example, represents her impressions of the city of Clermont-Ferrand, which she visited in preparation of her solo exhibition at FRAC Auvergne that will open in June 2021. Light and atmosphere often play an important role in her works.

Music is an important source of inspiration for the artist. She compares a painting to an orchestra: when she adds something to the canvas, she has to ensure that the composition remains balanced, just as the orchestration must be changed when an extra voice joins the orchestra. The monumental painting Noturno em Si Maior takes its title from the ‘Nocturnes’ of Frédéric Chopin, and is also a nocturnal scene. The titles of her works only emerge after the creation of the work, and in consultation with the poet Lucas Fazzio. Madrigal refers to a polyphonic composition for vocal music, but they chose it just as much for the musicality of the three syllables.

Clear contours generally mark out the various components that make up her landscapes, i.e. soil, vegetation, sky. While the dividing line between sky and land is sometimes difficult to read as a boundary, this is precisely the place where her painterly abilities come into their own. Through reduction and abstraction, she manages to separate the visited and imagined landscapes from reality and transform them into a painterly reality. The process is very important to Marina Rheingantz; she compares oil paint with clay or mud, a natural material she can model and sculpt.

For the first time, Marina Rheingantz will also show fabric works at Zeno X Gallery. They are often details from large paintings. In the past she translated embroidered fabrics into paintings, as if each brushstroke is applied to the canvas like a stitch. Now she has reversed the process. These works deconstruct and dissect the spontaneous touches of paint, transforming them into successive mechanical actions. The grid of the (embroidery) stitches contributes to the rhythmic and linguistic reading of her work.

Marina Rheingantz will have a museum solo exhibition in 2021 at FRAC Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand. Her work is part of several public collections such as Museu Serralves in Porto, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, The Rubell Collection in Miami, The Igal Ahouvi Collection in Tel Aviv, de Taguchi Art Collection in Tokyo, amongst others.