Matthias Reinmuth: rise

Edward Cella Art & Architecture proudly presents new paintings of German artist Matthias Reinmuth in his debut exhibition with the gallery entitled, rise. Composed of pure colors placed side by side and on top of each other that amalgamate weightlessly to shine and glow; Reinmuth considers his paintings to be emotional landscapes reflecting the constant flow of sounds, images and information that converge in our lives. Fascinated by the flow of fluctuating and simultaneous images that we experience in media and social networks; he seeks to represent the rush and blur of this information both conceptually and visually as one of his primary projects as a painter.

After a visit to Los Angeles in May 2019, the painting presented in rise were created in Berlin where Reinmuth lives and works. They are latest part of an ongoing series of painting he entitled Glimpse. Together they offer a brief, passing look at his most recent encounter with a place of strong personal, cultural, and political connections and meaning for the artist.

As Reinmuth states, “In Los Angeles there are these insanely great clear colors in the sky. The light is sensational! This has a lot to do with the sea and the light of the sun which is thrown from the Pacific to the land and together with the smog and all the fine dust in the valley the sunsets over the Pacific really glow in all its red tones. At the same time, the radiance of the West is extraordinarily strong. In Germany, English is the first foreign language you learn, and you grow up with all the California movies and television series.”

The oscillating color in Reinmuth’s painting suggest the infinite space and flickering luminosity of electronic screens yet are intensely analog. Composed of oil, acrylic, pigment, wax and varnish, they are the result of the artist’s well-developed craft that combines controlled chance and movement. Working on the canvas covered floor of his studio, he paints on stretched canvases and allows surplus pigment to flow onto the empty white surfaces below. These random drips begin to inform subsequent paintings and are like a form of perpetual motion – guided by his intuition. Only limiting the initial selection of colors for his compositions, Reinmuth ultimately reveals the intangible chemistry and alchemy of color itself.