Ilona Rainer-Pranter

» It feels as if I were trying to grasp something delicate, almost vanishingly fine
with an oversized, inflated hand—
while at the same time, with another, delicate, filigree hand,
trying to catch something massive, bulging, fat, and rolling away.

It is an eternal search.
For fulfillment. For content.
For the right form of expression.
For meaning. «

“How can the immaterial side of things be captured and translated into painting?” asks Ilona Rainer-Pranter.

Information, experiences, or impressions undergo a mental process, becoming increasingly abstracted and ultimately visually detached from their original context.

The process of reducing the motif goes hand in hand with the buildup of layers of paint. The canvas is primed, and like in mental sketches, several translucent layers of highly diluted oil and/or gouache paint follow. This results in abstract images that sometimes suggest remnants of objects, but not enough to identify them. They reveal what remains when only a distant memory of something lingers.

Viewers encounter surfaces, shapes, textures, and colors—
Ilona Rainer-Pranter’s point of departure is nature, but not in the conventional sense. The artist does not attempt to depict nature; rather, she reflects on this abstract, ambiguous concept and on society’s effort to put “nature” into language. In doing so, her painting unsettles the supposed clarity of definitions and invites us to question our understanding of nature.