Cristi Rinklin:Phantasmagoria

a solo exhibit of paintings and drawings

May 27 - July 9, 2005

Opening Reception: Friday, May 27, 7 - 9 pm

Artist's Talk: Thursday Night! June 2, @ 7 pm >>> MP3 Audio Tour of exhibit Podcast

PDF of press release with color pictures

Installation images and link to Cristi's web site

Boston Globe Review by Cate McQuaid

Green Street is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of paintings by Cristi Rinklin in Boston. Rinklin creates intensely colorful organic forms and spaces that oscillate between science, science fiction and decoration. These convincingly constructed spaces transport the viewer into a world where color has more in common with animated special effects and technology-based images than with the Baroque Italian painters that are often sources of the imagery. These spatially sculptural paintings emit color, and decorative patterning from billowing, translucent, slippery, wiggling organisms to create what the artist calls “impossibilities” that are both visually interesting and believable.

The fantastic color and deep pictoral space is populated by a crazy, hybrid assortment of animal, vegetable and architectural shapes. As magically weightless as they are realistic, these worlds within worlds connect with each other through a linear narrative related to perspective and through our associations with the suggestive forms. How we navigate them changes with our distance from the surface. Up close, each of these spacious works has a sumptuous, immaculate surface laboriously created in a surprisingly traditional material: oil on canvas. From a distance, the softly blurred transitions, translucency and sparkling highlights build convincing, dimensional objects within compositions that are strangely classical and contemporary at the same time.

The nature-based forms are set off from areas of clouds, rivers or softer painterly backgrounds by openings or silhouettes, often exuberantly Baroque, that divide the canvases structurally into foreground and background(s) (there are often several stages of visual depth). The synthetic, surreal effect of this realistic rendering of several of these "separate realities" in one composition is held together by the architecture that the artist uses to anchor these swirling worlds. Fleshy material spilling through these openings or dramatically draped from them draws the viewer deeper and deeper into the altered reality of the artist’s creation. In other works a central solid object, glowing with a watery light seems to be growing from a base of cellular, larval or internal structures that pulse or bulge with life.

- James Hull, Curator