Kristine Reiner

In deploying the rose as both implement and index, your work seems to collapse the distinction between mark making and referent, producing a surface in which representation folds back into process. Is this collapse to be understood as a critique of pictorial illusionism, or as an attempt to reinscribe materiality within the symbolic order of painting?
That collapse is very intentional. I’m not interested in painting of a rose—I want the rose to perform itself into the work. So the mark is the referent. There’s no illusion to decode because the object has already touched the surface. In that sense, yes, it resists illusionism—but more than critique, it’s about honesty. Materiality isn’t something I reinsert; it’s something I refuse to abandon. The painting holds the evidence of contact, not just representation.