Wasser Wesen

Sigrid von Lintig's paintings - An oceanic identification: swimming - painting

She loses nine tenths of her weight, her vertical hold, the control of her head, feels fear before her inner ear establishes a balance in the water space. She begins to orient herself, exhales against the hydrostatic pressure and surrenders to the gentle massage of the currents. Adrenaline courses through her blood; she feels happiness.

Does she swim or does she use the soft hairs of a brush to draw liquid acrylic droplets through a water space without horizon or perspective? She forms swirls and waves at arm's length, eddies that move the water like electrical energy. She does not seek mimesis on the canvas. The objectivity of the water, its refractions in the resistance of her body, remain incomprehensible to her.

She has been painting such pictures for ten years. She has been swimming every day for ten years and uses her friends as models in an indoor swimming pool. She loves its neutrality and the refracted light. She disregards the airspace - like Undine and the naiads.

Images of such events in the water, which photographers can create with bokeh lenses, the "Gaussian blur", 3D and holographic effects, create illusions on Cibachrome and Ilfochrome papers or screens: you are looking through a window pane.

Here, in Sigrid von Lintig's large painted pictures, they are so strongly dissolved that the painter (her models reflect her) moves or is moved in the swirls and currents of color, reaching out energetically or sinking lifelessly, rearing up or falling crouching, hovering between states of disappearance and appearance, as if her pictures were Alice's mirrors into another world - an "oceanic" one in which the zodiac signs of Pisces, Cancer and Scorpio rule over the art of painting.

www.wbecker.kulturserver.de

Aachen, December 2016

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