Rinella Alfonso
Park View/Paul Soto
19.11.2020 – 06.02.2021

LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS is proud to announce a solo exhibition with the Curaçao born, Amsterdam-based artist Rinella Alfonso (b. 1995), organized by Park view / Paul Soto.  Rinella Alfonso’s exhibition will be installed at the gallery as of Thursday November 19, which will mark the show’s opening.  The artist’s exhibition will continue until Saturday, January 16th, 2021.  Rinella Alfonso’s paintings foreground objects from everyday life within completely original and oftentimes stark fantasy worlds.  Using the formal structures of painting, Alfonso constructs poetic, abstract channels between memory and fiction, communicating new realities that speak in an imaginative and transformative language. Beaded curtains, plastic garden chairs, grocery store checkout dividers, and manicured hands manifest as icons in Alfonso’s works via pronounced scale shifts and contouring.  These omnipresent, cheaply produced, and consumable objects anchor the paintings, outsized focal points that bear meaning in her memories of people and places.  They float within pictorial space while entwining within the depths of their surrounding environments.  At other moments they are anchored along horizon lines, crawling and interacting with space, and parading as natural life – a mouth as the sun, or a hand as a creature, for example.

In Alfonso’s paintings, the conveyor belt of the supermarket can take on as much dramatic effect as a planet’s barren terrestrial landscape, with oceanic and punctiliar strokes conveying movement in economical ways.  As bodily forms also emerge from these shaped and impastoed pigments, what is remembered and thus consumed appears to enmesh with organic flesh as well, oftentimes in foreboding ways.  What is typically ignored – a cheap relic, the body – instead becomes the hyperbolic focus, a reflection of her own charged memories and their attachment to the world of things.  Within this procedure of production and consumption, Alfonso’s paintings’ absurdist natures materially ask about what reality could be, animist-like, where the world of things possesses a generative potential for enlivenment and reordering on its own. 

Rinella Alfonso (b. 1995) was born in Willemstad, Curaçao, and lives and works in Amsterdam.  She received her painting degree from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and is currently in residency at De Ateliers.  This is her first exhibition with the gallery.

images credits : Isabelle Artuis