Virva Hinnemo’s Painterly Monologues Explore the Space Between Nature & Abstraction

At ILLE Arts in Amagansett, twelve small canvases by the artist Virva Hinnemo exude a keen and painterly candor. Vaguely suggesting landscape, the paintings move between brightness and dusk like gusts of cool air. In her work, Hinnemo lays down rich laconic strokes that huddle in groups or stretch out across the canvas with a casual virtuosity that is fresh and intuitive. Her works explore the space between nature and abstraction with fluid calligraphic lines and a largely intangible palette that quietly fuses color with memory. Simultaneously looking out and looking in, her art possesses equal parts of sympathy and rigor, coalescing here in poignant, painterly monologues.

Hinnemo, who lives in Springs with her family, is a painter’s painter. Her canvases feel plunged into, with wet-into-wet brushwork that is urgent, lusty and unembellished. In Garage Friend, thick swashes of pigment lunge across the surface. The strokes lean into or slip over each other, commingled in a composition of murky greens and browns.

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"Garage Friend" by Virva Hinnemo, 2014. Oil on linen, 10 x 8 inches. Courtesy ILLE Arts.

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Small Kingdom is a jumble of swooping marks that waltz across the image field colliding in a soft pileup of muted blues, green and orange. Where the pathos comes in is in the quiet severity with which Hinnemo addresses the canvas. Variously brooding, demure or restlessly tender, her paintings are like fugues in which the mark-making feels live, with one stroke chasing another until they coalesce into tight visual allegories.

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