Manuela, named after the artist’s daughter, is not a straightforward portrait or private homage but rather Rheingantz’s painterly meditation on themes of growth and becoming. The canvas, dominated by cool shades of blue and violet, bears traces of time through layers of drips, stains, and branching marks—resembling a rain-washed wall or a blurred landscape half-remembered. Thin transparent washes coexist with thick, textured passages, producing a delicate tension between stillness and flux, between the frozen and the fluid.
What makes this work significant is its revelation of Rheingantz’s distinctive space between abstraction and representation. Unlike formalist abstraction, her paintings convey an unstable field of perception: hints of grass, rivers, night skies, or flickering light emerge only to dissolve again into color and texture. In this continual state of “becoming,” the image possesses a paradoxical quality—motionless yet never static, like a sensory moment in perpetual renewal.
Manuela thus reflects the artist’s gentle response to personal experience while embodying her broader methodology: interweaving memory, environment, and abstraction to transform the canvas into a site where time, body, and landscape merge. What unfolds before the viewer is not a “finished” image but a living field of perception—something being formed, felt, and gradually forgotten.