Iris Cintra | Islands
Curator: Smadar Schindler
An assemblage of figures, images, color and line clashes, that draws a close but unreachable place comprise the exhibition Islands in the Stream, that includes new oil paintings and treated photographs of imagined landscape.
Through painting, Iris Cintra aspires to express a highly-emotional mood concerning the complex relationships of figure-landscape-environment. To do this she using impressions drawn from sublimated personal experiences, and the painting itself is a product of the space and tension between the concrete and the mental. There are these tiny islands of intimacy created, inviting the observers to a meditative journey, allowing them to listen, feel, see.
In Islands Iris Cintra presents scenes in a landscape that is elsewhere. A place of light, vegetation, and water. The painting is open, physical, desiring. It is a painting on the edge of abstraction, with fantastic and dream-like qualities and a Matissean poetics, simple yet sophisticated.
The painting engages with archetypal, non-specified figures. Iris Cintra expresses with great transparency something immediate, sincere, and personal; A deep internal reflection of events that form the raw material or a lump of clay, from which she sculpts the painting, where light, movement, intense colors, free brush strokes, and images of fleeting moments, are all mixed together. A reclining figure on the sand, a little boy leaning on a wall with legs spread to the sides, three horses with four riders, children bathing on a rock, color patches creating a group of schematic figures bathing in the water, water symbolizing a mirror or a large eye.
Photography is both echoed and present in Iris’s works. A reference to that one may find in the work titled “Whiskey,” showing a scene of bathing children climbing a rock in Sinai and the photographer himself is in the painting. The abstract patches of color create figures that resemble tribal sculptures. The painting is named after the moment the picture was taken, when the artist heard the family in the photograph saying “Whiskey.”
The exhibition is comprised mostly of two bodies of works created in the past two years - oil paintings and a series of 40 small postcards in mixed media on photographs exhibited in a unique style.
Iris Cintra was born in Jerusalem and is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; She studied painting in The Art Students League of New York, and in 2009 moved to downtown Haifa. The studio and Haagaf Gallery, where she has been active in recent years, are located in Hanamal Street, that was once abandoned, neglected, and empty. Out of this vacuum, and together with other artist friends, Iris set up the gallery Haagaf which with time became a vibrant artistic center that creates space for her to meet, exchange ideas, experiment and experience.
Curator: Smadar Schindler
An assemblage of figures, images, color and line clashes, that draws a close but unreachable place comprise the exhibition Islands in the Stream, that includes new oil paintings and treated photographs of imagined landscape.
Through painting, Iris Cintra aspires to express a highly-emotional mood concerning the complex relationships of figure-landscape-environment. To do this she using impressions drawn from sublimated personal experiences, and the painting itself is a product of the space and tension between the concrete and the mental. There are these tiny islands of intimacy created, inviting the observers to a meditative journey, allowing them to listen, feel, see.
In Islands Iris Cintra presents scenes in a landscape that is elsewhere. A place of light, vegetation, and water. The painting is open, physical, desiring. It is a painting on the edge of abstraction, with fantastic and dream-like qualities and a Matissean poetics, simple yet sophisticated.
The painting engages with archetypal, non-specified figures. Iris Cintra expresses with great transparency something immediate, sincere, and personal; A deep internal reflection of events that form the raw material or a lump of clay, from which she sculpts the painting, where light, movement, intense colors, free brush strokes, and images of fleeting moments, are all mixed together. A reclining figure on the sand, a little boy leaning on a wall with legs spread to the sides, three horses with four riders, children bathing on a rock, color patches creating a group of schematic figures bathing in the water, water symbolizing a mirror or a large eye.
Photography is both echoed and present in Iris’s works. A reference to that one may find in the work titled “Whiskey,” showing a scene of bathing children climbing a rock in Sinai and the photographer himself is in the painting. The abstract patches of color create figures that resemble tribal sculptures. The painting is named after the moment the picture was taken, when the artist heard the family in the photograph saying “Whiskey.”
The exhibition is comprised mostly of two bodies of works created in the past two years - oil paintings and a series of 40 small postcards in mixed media on photographs exhibited in a unique style.
Iris Cintra was born in Jerusalem and is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; She studied painting in The Art Students League of New York, and in 2009 moved to downtown Haifa. The studio and Haagaf Gallery, where she has been active in recent years, are located in Hanamal Street, that was once abandoned, neglected, and empty. Out of this vacuum, and together with other artist friends, Iris set up the gallery Haagaf which with time became a vibrant artistic center that creates space for her to meet, exchange ideas, experiment and experience.