Petra Rintelen – Discovering meaning owing to beauty 

The still-lifes of  Petra Rintelen show fruits, animals, flowers, skulls, dishes, vases and other objects. Since centuries this genre exists, like in the paintings by Georg Flegel up to Otto Scholderer. The well-arranged compositions presented seashells, beetles and food in a light corner, an exclusive part of daylife, decorating the dining-room, masterly executed, arresting attention. The paintings of Petra Rintelen arise from some other mind-set. Quite normal things and pieces of scenery were concerted in ever changing compositions, ordered in tonal values, in a sometimes semi-dark room, that is ruminant, aesthetical, without further perspective statement. Often her settings are apparently visited, used or observed, by a fox, a magpie or a band of lemurs. So the paintings achieve another dimension, like a poem, in order to win this absoluteness, the essence. Through cutting the objects, unclear conditions of space and cause, she is leading the spectator beyond sensual perception. In moving the objects or the protagonists away from the chaining middles of the canvas, she is creating a consciousness for the perpetual „over“. By the slipping away of all ephemeral, she discovers meaning owing to beauty, lays open the deceiving appearance and the vanity of life. We will already find Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin discreetly entering this intellectual dimension, who captured in his still-lifes the objects in the charm of light and colour for the following generations up to Petra Rintelen. But, rarely another follower succeeded like her in creating such a metamorphosis to construe existence, such perceptible, pure and vivid sense beyond her motif.