Reisha Perlmutter’s oil paintings capture and secure our attention with a virtuoso performance of technical accomplishment. She makes compelling images of women, submerged and moving through water, bathed in a diffuse and fluid medium that suggests an otherworldly existence. Painted in a forensically-accurate representational style, her ethereal scenarios insist on a sensuous and corporeal physicality.
Perlmutter’s deft handling confers a convincing sense of immanent reality through a rigorous rendering of tonal value, subtle colour and delicate expression of the texture of skin and hair. The aquatic world is conjured up by her skilful description of rippling, glassy reflections, sparkling effervescences and luminous modulations of the ‘chiaroscuro’ effects of a body suspended in water.
These pictures can be seen to reference Thetis, a figure from archaic Greek mythology, the sea Goddess, a Nereid and daughter of the sea God, Nereus. Perhaps Perlmutter’s female protagonists spring from the same root. They inhabit the water-world, drifting at supple ease in what appears to be a sympathetic medium, that operates as a parallel or alternative reality to the everyday. By immersion, the painter’s models undergo a transformative process akin to baptism. They enter into a changed iteration of themselves. Here the water acts as an amniotic fluid, an essentially female element that generates life and an altered state of perception.
A recurrent theme is that of descent and escape into the ‘other’. The exhibition title ‘As Above, So Below’ implies a nether world of experience accessed through some form of portal. Myth, legend and religion all sanctify water sources as openings into profound spiritual experience. Reisha Perlmutter’s atmospheric and sensual paintings with their allusions to rebirth and regeneration take us closer to such experiences.
