Mutual Sentiments

Pauline Rintsch’s solo exhibition, Mutual Sentiments, explores everyday scenes and gestures, physicality and intimacy. With an open mind and a keen eye for detail, her paintings draw on people, objects, concepts, or moments that captivate her. Although inspired by her immediate surroundings, they are always imbued with a poetic, fairy-tale- like narrative. Contrasts converge: reality merges with dream, sensuality with innocence, mystery with familiarity, with a touch of the uncanny woven throughout. The artist’s paintings combine contemporary aesthetics with a symbolic imagery that gives her works a magical, anti-rational character. Seen through translucent layers of oil paint on paper is a portrait of a young woman proudly showing a pendant of Demeter, goddess of fertility, in profile. Elsewhere, manicured hands encircle a pair of legs, offering either protection or support, while the body—as suggested by the title, Mermaid Feet— is in a state of transformation. Other figures are shown in playful, almost farcical poses: clothes are lifted over heads in a game of hide-and-seek, somersaults are performed— it’s a topsy-turvy world. Mounted flat on the wall without a frame, Rintsch’s paintings confront themselves and the viewer as they are. Frameless—that is, unprotected, unadorned—they seem all the more vulnerable. Many paintings appear zoomed in, cropped, leaving the viewer in the dark as to where exactly the events depicted are taking place. They invite us to look closer, placing us in the role of voyeur when we see nude bodies or intimate scenes, even if the fragmentation of these figures means that we see only part of them. It is in this interplay of revealing and concealing that Rintsch also lays bare an objectifying view of the body. Mutual Sentiments shows the artist deftly navigating the boundaries between genuine intimacy, self-conscious posing, and playful, deeply-felt fantasy.