Review from Will Yaya - Artventurous Magazine Editor and artist.

Rita Madelaine Loewenthal strips the landscape of description and leaves only pressure. Her mountains are not depicted; they are compressed into mass and gestures. What remains is weight, abrasion, and a horizon that barely holds.

The gold ground dominates. It is flat, yet scarred, luminous yet worn down. Rather than functioning as decoration, it operates as a field of tension, a surface that feels both sacred and exhausted. Its metallic sheen catches the light, but scratches and ruptures interrupt of any sense of transcendence. The paintings refuse serenity. Against this unstable gold, black forms push forward. They are less silhouettes than accumulations, dragged, splintered, eroded. Loewenthal allows paint to thicken and fracture, to drip and resist control. The mountains feel provisional, as if they might collapse back into the surface at any moment. Solidity is treated as temporary.

Horizontals cut through the composition with restraint. These lines suggest distance or or reflection, yet they never fully stabilize the image. Instead, they emphasize suspension, a pause between emergence and disappearance.

The work carries the compression of a haiku without illustration.

New life pours around

The cycle of birth and death

A whiff in the dark

This is not romantic landscape painting. It is landscape reduced to elemental conflict, light against void, surface against depth, formation against decay. Loewenthal’s textures read like excavation sites. Each mark implies removal as much as edition.

In these paintings, the mountain is not a symbol of permanence. It is a fault line, a structure under stress. What endures is not form, but tension.

-Will Yaya-

editor of Artventurous Magazine