Under Their Skin

Under Their Skin

Under Their Skin - the paintings of Rine Boyer - with critical review by Robert Kameczura

The work of Rine Boyer is about the subtle visual body language that lies just under the surface of how people communicate. In many of her pieces an element of misunderstanding lies between the characters: A central theme in her paintings is how relationships work, and how they don't work.

Her characters' hand movements and gestures reveal nuances in the limbo of non-communication.  These characters often seem to come from a distinctly youthful urban milieu involving parties, bar talk and friends sharing confidences, as well as social events involving family and friends, or just passers by on the street.  Her work sometimes extends to semi-formal portraits, but even there she pays close attention to how people stand, arrange their arms and bodies, and dress and groom.  The expressions in her characters' faces are also the central elements to her work. The result is a warm and affectionate examination of  people and relationships with a keen sense of when relationships become disfunctional and how communication sometimes meet dead ends.

Her style has an elegant, unpretentious simplicity – a clarity of design that presents clean outlines often cut off by the edges of the picture frame and bold patterns in geometric areas. These elements are all highly characteristic of Japanese prints, as is the quiet, warm earth tone palette she uses. The tiny icons she works into the pattern of people's clothing and hair have just a touch of Gustav Klimt's Ravenna-inspired patterning, but in the case of Rine Boyer, these small icons are a hint about what the people in her paintings are thinking, clues in the puzzle of who is thinking what.

Her art has a distinctly unpretentious Midwestern flavor – one might even say it is a Chicago flavor in that the people she paints have a casualness of bearing, the feeling of being unaware of how they look in other people's eyes. This unpretentious simplicity and the feeling of people "just being themselves" follows in the lineage of some well-known Midwestern artists from the 20th Century, including Grant Wood (American Gothic) and Edward Hopper (Nighthawks).

Looking further back into Western art history, one of the key elements denoting a profound change in our world view came onto the scene in the 14th Century with the artist Massaccio. He differed from all artists who came before him in his emphasis not on theatrical gestures or poses, but in paying close attention to the actual way the people hold themselves.  (His most famous work is The Tribute Money.) Massaccio was a keen student of the way people fold their arms, stand and confront one another in conversations, arguments and the exchange of close confidences. His work demonstrates how body language often expresses more of what people mean to say than the words they speak. Rine Boyer's paintings and drawings distantly echoe these same aesthetic concerns.

However, Boyer's work is very contemporary in tone. It sets it's goal as an exploration of the ways people chat, drink and party by revealing the inner psychology behind outward gestures and appearance. It is a sensitive and intelligent look at how who people are and how people "hang out" in the world of today's Chicago.

– Robert Kameczura