Saskia Pintelon

She begins with a face and then she works against it. In her studio near Colombo, Saskia Pintelon takes an image she has already printed or painted, often one of her own, and builds over it in collage and mixed media until the first likeness gives way to a second, rawer one beneath. The result is a portrait that will not settle: physiognomy held up for study and, in the same gesture, taken apart.

She was born in Belgium in 1945 and trained as an artist there, teaching at the Sint-Lucas school in Ghent before she moved to Sri Lanka with her husband and family in 1982. The island became her home and her subject for more than four decades, long enough that the Colombo scene counts her among its own, and she has said its stories, its politics and its day-to-day life feed the work as much as any private concern. That double belonging, Belgian by birth and Sri Lankan by long residence, sits inside the pictures: faces that could be anyone, made by someone who arrived from elsewhere and stayed.

Her central body of work is a study of the human face pursued across decades. An early series set large monochrome heads on recycled tea-packaging bags, drawn from the marriage proposals printed in Sri Lankan newspapers, so that the private business of matching a face to a future became a public grid of strangers. These gathered into the ‘Book of Faces’, published in 2007 and shown complete in Colombo soon after, and the enquiry continued in later series such as ‘I AM ME’ in 2016, where large mixed-media collages begin from a blank page and build the figure up rather than paint it down. Across them the writing is often stitched into the canvas in her own hand, so the surface carries both image and voice.

Her work has been shown for decades in Colombo, at Paradise Road Galleries and the Lionel Wendt, and she is represented by Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo and Yavuz Gallery in Singapore. Beyond the island she has appeared at the Dhaka Art Summit and the Colombo Art Biennale, carrying the layered, figurative-expressionist language that has made her a senior presence in Sri Lankan contemporary art.

What holds the eye in a Pintelon face is the argument inside it: the wish to fix a person in a single image, set against her refusal to let that image stand unchallenged. She makes a likeness, then she overwrites it, and the person survives in the friction between the two.