Belgium-born Saskia Pintelon moved to Sri Lanka in 1982. Inspired by local and universal issues, stories from the gut and the heart, politics, and day-to-day concerns, her body of works interprets the collective human experience, environment, and the cycle of life with intimate and personal preoccupations. Saskia Pintelon is at heart a figurative painter who periodically verges towards abstraction and text-based work. The abstract canvases began as monochrome, some titled Spaces for Thought, later evolving into Mindscapes; a series of works with an abundance of color that the artist describes as selfies of the mind in its synoptic chaos. Physiognomy fascinates the artist and in the past translated itself into a series of large works, monochrome on recycled tea packaging bags, inspired by marriage proposals in the newspapers of Sri Lanka. Her 2016 series titled I AM ME consists of works from two series, small mixed-media collages and large mixed-media collages. Both are part of an ongoing project whereby the artist revisits her own work in the published, printed accordion-style book The Book of Faces whereby she customizes her own ‘Faces’ and turns them into ‘Other Faces’. The themes are some of her recurring ones related to age, beauty, gender, internet use, love, obsession with fitness, isolation, loneliness, and the balance between the public and the private us. Pintelon provides us a kaleidoscope of the physical and the emotional in her characteristic tongue-in-cheek approach as she subtracts, extracts, and adds to give us a glimpse into what makes us really human.
