Saskia Pintelon

The work of the Belgian artist Saskia Pintelon, who lives and works in Sri Lanka since 1981, is driven by an almost instinctive captivation of her immediate surroundings. Her creative universe is primarily focused on her new home which radically differs from her western homeland in nature, culture, rites, and religion.

Pintelon's oeuvre is diverse, however, her paintings, collages, and works on paper are all characterized by an urge for innovation, recycling, and experimenting with text and image, thus resolutely moving beyond the boundaries of the prevailing tendencies and mainstream. In the exhibition, the focus is on the graphic work, initiated in 2004 with the now iconic series Faces made on local tea bags. Pintelon's most recent work NO NEWS GOOD NEWS serves as a magnum opus. These ongoing series of newspaper collages display the power of her imagination, fueled by an idiosyncratic sensibility towards identity, humanity, humor, and social criticism.

The delayed perception of time, the connection between man and nature, arranged marriages, the importance of astrology and horoscopes, the precarious architecture, the annual monsoons, and the coexistence of Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists, are but a few of the topics that serve as an inexhaustible source of inspiration, wonder, and questioning. This is illustrated in a series of paintings in which Pintelon handled all kinds of local ways of healing ailments (Be Your Own Doctor) and a series of works based on daily marriage announcements in local newspapers. Pintelon's work expresses a seemingly childlike fascination for Sri Lanka. An interest unrelated to any exoticism or romantic escapism, but testifying of an indefatigable generosity and Pintelon's free, open mind. No ponderous discourse about East and West, but attention to the trivial, the peripheral, and the humane. Such representations obviously confront the Western viewer, even though indirectly, with its neoliberal counterpart.