Olivia Pinter in the David Krut Workshop
The David Krut Workshop (DKW) had the pleasure of welcoming abstract Painter Olivia Pintér to our print studio. Pintér worked with collaborator Roxy Kaczmarek on a series of monotypes. This painterly printmaking process has the artist painting onto a piece of plexi–plastic. A sheet of paper is then pressed onto the surface of the painting using the printing press and a unique impression of the image is transferred onto the paper.
Pintér experimented with water-based monotypes and oil-based monotypes, two slightly different approaches to making an image, and settled on the oil-based ink technique. This process requires some urgency as the use of solvents to dilute the ink into washes prompt it to dry more quickly, which can prevent an accurate transfer. The process allows an artist a rapid, and looser approach to their mark-making. The surface of the plexi-plastic is also smooth and slippery, so in contrast the application of the paint has a different feel to painting on canvas.
Pintér explains her process by saying: ‘I am exploring, through paint, what is held in the in-between; the space between knowing and not-knowing. I ask paint to reveal what lies in the cracks of meandering questions between land and self; land and digital; land and reference and now imagined landscape.
“These landscapes departed from the ordered nature of the values of the screenshot, cropped horizons, and grid of pixels into a numeric muddle of marks and bright, toxic, exciting colour. Paint becomes place. The layering of imagined, but not entirely imagined, marks become site.”
“In amongst these layers live the reference points of the tailings dam, screenshot, alternate compositions, uneasy questions and shaking, temporal answers. They become both place and non-place. They become vessels of memory and holders of every muddled thought I encountered in my meetings with these surfaces. Their lines extend into horizons of other knowing and not knowing that words are perhaps too limited to describe.
I rely here on paint, on marks, on surface, on colour to communicate and excavate what could be known and not-known by land, by an ultimate, I think, placeholder.” Olivia Pintér, 2023.
Pinter’s works are in preparation for her solo project Notes in Flight with David Krut Projects at the 151 Blue House Gallery. To receive the catalogue, please mail [email protected] or take a look on our online Viewing Room.
Olivia Pintér (b. 2000) is a Johannesburg-based artist. She completed her BAFA at the University of the Witwatersrand. Pintér’s practice centers on process-based methodologies that interrogate the affective agencies of abstract painting. She is concerned with how painting may store and communicate information beyond representation and likeness.
Relationships between image and text are also central to her writing and painting practice, with a focus on how interventions between these two modalities may marry, extend, and limit each other.
