Marina Rheingantz: Painting Memory, Weaving Landscape

In her solo exhibition, “Iris” at Bortolami Gallery in New York, Brazilian artist Marina Rheingantz refuses to adhere to the boundaries of genre painting. Rheingantz renders landscapes both fluid and fragmented in oil paintings and textiles. In doing so, she blurs the material limits of medium and mind, probing the contours of consciousness. With stylistic precision, she articulates a phenomenological experience of landscape – one that resists a fixed perspective and invites the viewer into shifting terrain mediated by memory and time.

Art critic Anne Helmreich once defined landscape as both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it is “a picture representing natural inland scenery, as distinguished from a sea picture, a portrait.” As a verb, it signifies “a view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view.” Taken together, these definitions expand the idea of landscape, not just as a naturalistic reflection of the external world, but as a theoretical process: something seen, remembered, and interpreted.

The exhibition’s layout subtly reinforces this disorientation. Designed to be experienced clockwise, the viewer may instinctively move in the opposite direction, drawn to “Orvalho” (2024), the largest painting in the exhibition. The seventeen-foot painting is a flaring wave of turquoise and lavender. Rheingantz daubs the diluted surface with black impasto and blemishes, creating loose white clouds that harmonize with the loose landscape.

The impulse to move around the exhibition the opposite way feels neither wrong nor correct but simply resonates, guided by internal rhythm rather than imposed order. The painting is an orchestrated piece on vaporization. It captures a prospect of landscape from the mind of Rheingantz, while simultaneously standing as an atypical representation of landscape as a portrait. The dual experience mimics the act of remembering: nonlinear, intuitive, and shaped by emotional cues over recollection.

If Rheingantz’s paintings deconstruct place, atmosphere, and time, her textile work assembles them. “Pilgrim” (2025), is an intricate tapestry of a surrealist desert. Rheingeintz crafts birds as mauve speckles against a taupe grey background. Spasmodic clusters of forest green and rich rosewood thread dart across the composition of desolate terrain, heightening its topographical features. The tapestry reveals a landscape shaped by emotional memory, echoing Anni Albers’s concept of “pictorial weaving” where textile transcends utility and becomes an image. Rheingantz’s work compels us to see not what landscape is, but how it is remembered, intuited, and reconstructed through unconventional artistic practices.

The titular painting, “Iris’ (2024), hangs alongside “Tumbleweed Whisperer” (2024) and “Manuela” (2024), arranged in a triptych against the gallery’s stark white wall. Together, they form a suspended rhythm– each piece resisting linear narrative and offering the viewer a space to linger, and perhaps, to reflect on the unbounded dynamism of environmental forces through a critically sensitive lens.

“Iris” (2024) acts as an anchor. Its palette is unsettled: a pale white mountain dominates the grey composition, disfigured by bleeding flicks of indigo and ochre freckles. This painting insists that landscape is never static but a series of gestures and impulses, imitating sporadic weather patterns and passing thoughts. It offers a perspective view on landscape painting, where Rheingantz further conceptualizes the natural world through the elusive crevices of her memory and instinct.

Likewise, “Tumbleweed Whisperer’ (2024) expands this language into a space of loose orientation. The composition drifts as if guided by wind. It hums with low chromatin tones– dusty mauves, sunburnt yellows, shadows of brush and field– that mimic the faded memory of arid terrain.

“Manuela” (2024), titled after Rheingantz’s newborn daughter, is both intimate and elemental. It reads as an ode to seasonality. Specks of golden pigment blush through a translucent wash of indigo. There is a vulnerability to its palette. Rheingantz cements her spontaneous and disruptive approach to painting, analogizing motherhood as a kind of weather–shifting, uncontainable, and full of infinite possibility and wonder.

Through gestures that blur place and recall, through materials including painting and thread, Rheingantz reconstructs the environment as a series of temporal fields. “Iris” transcends genre, treating landscape not as a subject but as a living method. These works invite the viewer to sit with ephemerality; its ability to mirror our own shifting interior worlds.

With the plain yet classically inspired setting of the gallery, her works are felt. They may appear fleeting and fiercely personal. In the end, Rheingantz invites us not to seek clarity, but to wander toward a deeper recognition of how we carry land within us: as season, as rhythm, and as memory.