Tarnish & Gold

Paintings from Films

by Greta July 21st, 2010

Erik Reinholtz

Currently showing

Closing Reception this Friday.

7:00 pm – 12:00 am

“My paintings use the vernacular of cinematic techniques to investigate how we
create narratives to construct meaning in our lives. The work is conceptually
bound by my process of watching films, selecting an image that inspires me,
capturing a still from the screen and finally recreating that image using my own
cast and characters. My brain is continually acting as a screen because I am
saturated by the constant stimulus of moving images causing my projections
and reality to blend with one another. I want to inspire viewers of my paintings
to create their own narrative. It is not necessary for the viewer to recognize the
original film still.

Among the auteurs that I borrow from are Bela Tarr, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar
Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. The paintings are minimal stories about
the plight of individuals caught up in personal dilemmas. The aesthetic of
each painting is deeply influenced by the vision of the particular filmmaker.
For example, in paintings inspired by Antonioni films, I convey my characters
predicament concentrating on their faces, their bodies, and especially their
interaction with their surroundings. I direct a character from my personal life
to portray my interpretation of the original still and take photographs of them to
serve as source material. The process of romanticizing my imagery is borrowed
from cinematic framework by transforming the mundane into the provocative.
My work is about recontextualization. I choose an image and edit it through
painting to create a hybrid narrative. My painting titled “A Glorious Death for a
Little Man” is a reinterpretation of Anna Karina’s role in Pierrot Le Fou. I sought
to convey the pulp inspired narrative through the dramatically violent pose from
the viewpoint of a sexualized male gaze upon the female figure. Borrowing
aesthetically from Godard, I used a palette focusing on saturated primary colors.
I reconstruct reality by merging a fictional world with my world and my aesthetics
with the filmmaker’s.

When staging my compositions, I collage sources that don’t blend naturally. This
assists in creating a non-conventional dreamscape, which bridges the hyper-real
and the painterly. Although I work closely with the photograph, at some point I
make a formal compromise with the photographic image. The degree of realism
I decide to achieve can greatly effect the overall aesthetic of a piece. How I
interpret the source material is combined with a photographic image to create a
hybrid reality that only I can compose. I paint because I find it the most conducive
medium to selectively remove and alter components to reach a preferred
aesthetic. Paint is a philosophical medium of building imagery slowly through
layers. As I spend time with the image, it becomes more multidimensional
through selective analysis and editing.

Narrative presents itself in my paintings as a story that I have reconstructed
according to my environment and consequently leaves the image ambiguous
enough for the viewer to construct their own narrative. I recontextualize a
mediated image to explore narrative as a mode of understanding.”