Bortolami is pleased to present its third solo exhibition with Brazilian artist Marina Rheingantz. Iris brings together a series of turbid abstractions, oil paintings and textiles, as highly sensitive and affective research into often imperceptible yet felt phenomena—geological and meteorological shifts, the flow of tides, and atmospheric events. Rheingantz has honed a characteristic style, a blending of veil-like overlays of paint and impastoed bespecklings, that serves to describe what exists just beyond the optical, planted instead within unfolding events. While translations to topographies—the gulf between a place versus its memory, as well as the entropies it inevitably withstands—continue to inform her practice, Rheingantz’s increasingly attenuated interpretation suggests a sensitivity to the ambient over the literal.

Iris, the exhibition, is a sweeping picture of the unbounded dynamism of geographies and an understanding of the natural world by its own environmental conditions. The titular painting is a tall canvas in cadet grey, bursting with daubs of flickering yellow and seemingly congealing into depths of ash. The accretion of coagulated oils on the surface could suggest a detailed chronicling of a flower’s petals—an insistence of nature’s continuous evasion of strict design despite its proclivity for repetition. The overall blustering and seemingly spontaneous dragged vertical brush marks could also very well encase an entire lawn of these dancing flowers. Or are we instead looking through a complex lens, like the iris of the eye? We seem to reach representation only to have the illusion disintegrate into a metaphysical proposal.