Saskia Pintelon: Mindscapes

Yavuz Gallery presents Mindscapes, a solo exhibition of recent works by Sri Lanka-based Belgian artist Saskia Pintelon. In a series of large-scale paintings exhibited for the first time in Asia, vibrant colours serve as an abstraction of the multitude of emotions and ruminations that pervade the human mind, and that incessant stream of consciousness in all of us that is so hard to silence or ignore.

Pintelon is best known for her raw and deeply personal works that interpret the collective human experience, environment and the cycle of life, typically executed in a monochrome palette of muted colours and shades of black and grey. Mindscapes marks a vivid and explosive return of colour to her visual repertoire after a long period of absence. Here, colour serves not simply as a mode of expression, but also as a guiding force in creation. Pintelon describes the making of these works as cathartic and almost trance-like. She likens her application of colour on canvas to a chef throwing ingredients into a curry, constantly adding and adjusting, feeling and savouring, organically creating a colourful, mysterious ‘hotpot’ with mastery of technique.

The works on view retain the contemplativeness and intimacy that characterize Pintelon’s practice, bringing us to the most intimate of spaces: the human mind. These mindscapes depict our innermost thoughts, with all of its randomness and neuroses; the stimulus of the external world and its effect on us. Like sparkling synapses, they capture a fleeting mental moment, an abstracted landscape mapping out a mental, emotional and spiritual chaos that cannot be contained. Colours undulate from the canvas in liquid, ebullient forms, unfathomable amalgamations and magic summations emanating straight from the gut of the artist that defeat words and stir on layered levels.

For Pintelon, these works are the culmination of life-long observation and experience. They ask existential questions about why we let ourselves get caught up in anger and sadness; why we experience wrath and jealousy when all we want is stillness and peace. They speak of pervading frustration and anxiety, of delight and joy, of beauty and love, of our inner state of mind and the external reality. They are abstractions of nature and our nature, and an ode to this ‘Sea of Madness’ we all live in.