Marina Rheingantz makes viewers lose their footing and their focus with 'Míope' show

[INTERVIEW]

From across a room, a Marina Rheingantz painting behaves like a landscape. Walk toward it and it stops looking like anything at all — the vegetation, the weather, the ground beneath both break down into stains, scraped patches and deposits of paint thick enough to cast shadows of their own. The Brazilian painter works in the gap between what the eye assembles and what is actually sitting on the canvas, and the small shock of arriving at the surface is the impact.

“Míope,” Rheingantz’s first solo exhibition in Korea, opened at White Cube Seoul on Tuesday, timed to overlap with Frieze Seoul. Rheingantz has had solo shows at Milan, Nimes and New York over the past two years, showed at the 15th Gwangju Biennale in 2024, and holds work in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“Míope” gathers 13 paintings and an embroidered work, all made over the past year in her São Paulo studio, and takes its name from one of the canvases’ titles — Portuguese for nearsighted. The Korean title, “Pyeonlin,” means fragment or sliver.

Rheingantz, who is nearsighted herself, did not arrive at the word through metaphor.

“When I had to decide the title of the show, I thought ‘Míope’ was the best one because it was more open,” said Rheingantz during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at the White Cube Seoul gallery in Gangnam District, southern Seoul on Aug. 27. “It changes the way you relate to everything. And also when I am at the studio, if I don’t wear my glasses, I have a different relationship with the works from far and from close.”

In the title painting of the show, fine botanical marks are laid down with near-pointillist precision and then swallowed by fog, and certain shapes overlap one another until the eye seems to be seeing double. None of it is plotted in advance by the artist, according to Rheingantz.

“I think it is important, but it’s a more intuitive process than calculated,” said Rheingantz. “It’s not that I think I’m going to do this here or this there, but it is some natural balance during the process. It’s something that happens between being more abstract and some parts more figurative.”

Rheingantz’s spatial logic is something other than Western, closer to East Asian ways of organizing a picture, according to White Cube Seoul’s exhibition text introducing the exhibition. Rheingantz herself put a distance between her work and that reading.

“I think that’s an interpretation, because it’s actually very funny — I don’t know how to make perspective so well, and it’s actually something I never wanted to learn,” said Rheingantz. “I like to have this kind of nonlogical, nonreadable, nonrealistic something. I prefer this kind of being open to create something else, not having just a representation of something.”

What she wants is for the viewer to lose their footing, which is why the horizon lines rarely appear in her paintings and why foreground and background trade places.

“When you see a landscape you just recognize, ah, this is a place, but trying to create a different relationship with that is what I wish,” said Rheingantz. “You never know if it’s from above or from below. You get a bit lost if you don’t have the horizon.”

The material for Rheingantz’s work comes from an archive of photographs, textile references and memory, though none of it moves directly onto the canvas. Watercolor sits in between, loosening the image first.

“If I go directly from a picture to a painting, it gets difficult, it gets wrong in a way — not wrong, but it gets too figurative, and for me in a way it’s boring,” said Rheingantz. “So it’s important to have this kind of process where I have something in between the archive and the paintings. It helps refreshing the eye and the memories, and trying to create new vocabularies.”

The memories are specific and rural. Rheingantz was born in 1983 in Araraquara — the countryside of São Paulo state — and spent months of every year on her grandmother’s farm, three hours away, from the age of two until she was 11 or 12.

“For me it’s the most important memories I have from my childhood, at the farm,” said Rheingantz. “There was a man who used to take care of the farm and I was very much with him. Every time I arrived there we were there for a month, sometimes two months, and I was all the time with him, doing everything with him, picking the vegetables, washing the horses.”

What she took from it was a set of physical appetites — for freedom, for unbroken time, for dirt.

“There was a small river and we used to play with the mud, and my father made a small bench for us so we could be there longer and playing,” said Rheingantz. “When I started painting, after a while, I also wanted to bring this kind of feeling to the painting, like this dirty and, you know, modeling clay. I like to bring this materiality into the work, to have this more body and not just flat image.”

Her studio habits are built around a productive lack of hygiene.

“I like being a bit dirty. I never wash my brushes, for example,” said Rheingantz. “When I take them, they are all together, and I just take them and I clean them on the canvas. So it's a way of starting.”

From there the surfaces accumulate and are taken back down. She thins pigment with turpentine oil and lets it bleed, then builds, then sands, and the smaller canvases — “Periquita,” “Caracol,” “Taturana” — end up with the mottled look of stripped wallpaper.

“It’s always a lot of layers. Sometimes I sand with sandpaper, so many layers get into one, so it brings some light from the back,” said Rheingantz. “It’s some kind of long process, sometimes like excavation.”

“I actually don’t like to control — I think it’s much nicer when you allow the material itself to bring the work together,” said Rheingantz. “That’s what I love in painting. This kind of magic that happens, you know, that you don’t control, you don’t know what is going to happen.”

Rheingantz has spent a decade researching tapestries and fabrics, and makes embroidered works with her mother and the Uruguayan artisan Jorge Francisco Soto. One of them, “Outono,” hangs in the Seoul show, its rows of stitching crossing the composition like furrows in tilled ground.

Another canvas is titled “Seoul,” painted in gold before she saw the city, its source a silk-flowered frame on a friend’s Japanese artwork.

“I knew it was going to come to the show,” said Rheingantz. “I think the gold is a very Asian matter, you know, this kind of textile fabric, silk. So I wanted to make use of it.”

She no longer thinks of the genre as the thing she is working on.

“I think in that way the landscape became more of a framework,” said Rheingantz. “It’s more about different places and not just the landscape itself. The memories and the feelings.”

There are, roughly, two kinds of people — those who go back to their memories and rearrange them, and those who let them go. Rheingantz firmly believes herself to be the former.

“I think I am always bringing my memories into my work,” said Rheingantz.

“Míope” runs at White Cube Seoul until Oct. 24.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]