Kirstine Reiner Hansen

Kirstine Reiner Hansen, who has built a reputation for her depictions of figures in turbulent, glamour-tinged environments, has moved towards a new subject: landscapes. Her recent canvases, which she describes as “shaped by absence,” are meditations on environmental themes that extend the artist’s collage-like explorations of perception without relying on human narratives and situations. It feels, in some sense, that the figures and architectural vistas that had been appearing in her paintings were stage sets which have now fallen away, and their absence helps create the tensions and possibilities that animate the new work.

Reiner Hansen, who has an affinity for visual paradox, manages to hybridize Romantic scenes of vastness with random bits of glitchy visual clutter. They are insistently painted —and in some respects abstract—while still “real” enough to offer the possibility that a certain place might be recognized, but only fitfully. The paintings offer vistas that seem to say that scenic beauty is still available, but not in a pure form. Reiner Hansen’s color choices, which range from drab to lurid, further complicate the painting’s contradictory emanations. As the artist seems to understand, to paint the landscape as something tangible and welcoming seems almost impossible now, since our experience of it is so often filtered by screens or tainted by a foreboding of environmental catastrophe. She gives us all the beauty she can, but knows that beauty alone doesn’t suffice to tell us what she feels about nature at this precarious moment in time.

-John Seed