(...) Each painting pertains to a tradition of the portrait that painting notably passed on to photography at the turn of the 18th century – the composition, the pause, the light, focused on a part of the face, the gentle or intense look give the visitor the impression that every gorilla emerges from an endless dream or from a mysterious stasis magnified by the sublime black backgrounds which defines them all. O. Reinton thus honors each face like a notable member of a family who would care about telling their generational history thanks to the so-called “family portraits”. But, paradoxically, each portrait is also a print, the painting facsimile of a more ordinary kind of images – the photo ID, the one that you can get at a photo-robot for instance. Emotion then bursts out from this discrepancy between the two categories of images (...)

    Extract from an article by Maxime Scheinfeigel, published in Art Sud, n°50, 2005

Some exhibition views from the past:

Homage to endangered gorillas | 200 portraits

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