A Pass of Hand
A hand makes a pass at holding the threads of that which it cannot make certain. It grasps toward the impression that makes itself known. Threads of the intimate, quotidian, material and immaterial tangle, and knot themselves in paint. Image emerges from what is observed, listened to and acted upon. A hand reaches across time and space in a haptic attempt to stretch and remember. It may touch another. It may hold. It may dissolve. These paintings are not at the hand, but with it. Mark making oscillates between robust and fleeting. At times there is a simultaneous sense of surety and a lack thereof. Something slips through fingers while the hand maintains its gesture of holding. The weight of that residue settles on surface. Paint holds what can no longer be touched.
Proximity between the body and the surface become site. This distance plays into a consideration about layering time into image, and further asks how one may engage the work in space. Scale implores multiple forms of engagement- how my body interacts with the surface in process and also in how the surface is activated in space. Seemingly empty space is in contact with the painted surface. The material memory of my body’s play with the work is stored in gestures of mark making. The ebb and flow of bodies, in the curated space, pushes and pulls at the spaces between. You touch what you cannot see.
190 x 75 cm
190 x 75 cm
Notes On Painting is part of Pintér’s honours equivalent research that takes the form of a written tangential account of her thoughts and encounters in painting as praxis. She employs writing as a strategy toward unraveling that which she cannot quite grasp, while also gesturing toward the intuitive aspects of painting that she considers as an important impulse in her work.
Bio
Olivia Pintér (b. 2000- Johannesburg, South Africa) is a Johannesburg based artist. She is currently completing her BAFA at The University of the Witwatersrand. Pintér’s practice centers process based methodologies that interrogate the affective agencies of abstract painting. She is concerned with how painting may store and communicate information beyond representation and likeness. Relationships between image and text are also central to her writing and painting practice, with focus on how interventions between these two modalities may marry, extend and limit each other.
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