‘Welcome to the madhouse’—a pithy line beneath an impish face mid-wink greets you as you enter Gallery Pristine Contemporary, almost like a personal prelude from artist Saskia Pintelon to her new solo show. As you glance around the gallery (turned-metaphorical-madhouse), the faces and phrases that stare back seem to register your presence. Knowing smiles, arched brows, and piercing gazes envelop you, and one thing is made clear: there is nothing subdued about Pintelon’s artistic expression.
“I scream through my paintings,” she says. “The canvas becomes my voice, the pigment my insistence.” Thus, a fitting title to the show, No One Can Silence Me brings together over twenty-five acrylic-on-paper works that highlight the Belgian artist’s decades-long examination of faces and words as vehicles of dissent. Pintelon admits the title can seem almost hostile at first, though her definition of silencing is more nuanced than mere censorship. “Silencing often operates subtly. It is embedded in stereotypes and stigmas that encourage one to shrink, to soften, to withdraw,” she says. “Words have a weight—they carry history, conviction, and consequence. So too does the text that inhabits my artworks. It is never decorative; it is deliberate. It insists on being read, on being heard.”
Across the gallery, this insistence feels tangible. The handwritten lines, which are laconic, humorous, and at times poignant, create a deliberate dissonance with the expressions on the faces. Pintelon acknowledges this discordance, confirming that the phrases do not exist to serve as captions or explain the images in any sense, but rather to introduce another layer of questioning. Her aim is to mildly unsettle the observer and invite curiosity about the subject of the picture and what their story may be. She says, “Often, the eyes in my portraits appear naïve—they invite empathy, yet they withhold certainty and authority. The text intervenes in that space. It asks what those eyes are truly trying to say. What lies behind the composed surface? What has been swallowed, suppressed, or left unspoken?” In other instances, the text betrays what the face aims to hide. “It gives voice to the interior—to doubt, to longing, to resistance, to memory,” she adds. “The portrait presents presence; the writing suggests consciousness. Together, they create a dialogue that neither could sustain alone. So the words are not explanatory, they are revelatory. They do not complete the image; they complicate it. And in that complication, I find truth.”
The Belgian native has made Sri Lanka her home for over four decades now. When she first arrived, she was fascinated by South Asian features and the codes of identity she observed: from the jewellery to the hair slicked back with coconut oil. “Even the visual poetry of Sinhalese calligraphy and the indigenous materials of Sri Lanka—paper used for tea bags, rubber packaging materials—entered my creative vocabulary,” she says. This new set of works captures “both Caucasian features and Tamilian faces,” though many of her faces eschew racial and gendered conformity. “Yet undeniably, the social construct of Sri Lanka has been a profound backdrop to my work; it has shaped not only how I observe faces, but how I read what lies beneath them,” she says.
For Gallery Pristine Contemporary’s directors, Arjun Sawhney and Arjun Butani, starting the year with this exhibition feels only fitting. Pristine opened its doors in 2024 with a solo show by Pintelon, so this return to her work feels like a full-circle moment. “Saskia’s bold and unflinching engagement with society and its complexities felt entirely aligned with how we wished to begin 2026,” they say. “Increasingly, we are all being asked, in subtle and overt ways, to be silent, to comply, to soften our voices. In that context, No One Can Silence Me is not merely an exhibition title—it is an energy, a declaration for the year ahead.”
Coinciding with the exhibition is Pintelon’s forthcoming book, with a foreword by Diana Campbell, Artistic Director of the Bukhara Biennale and a long-time friend of the artist. Speaking of the trust that is essential to a creative partnership of this nature, Pintelon says, “Diana has visited my studios in Belgium and in Sri Lanka; she knows the rhythm of my work, the shifts in material, the silences between series. To allow someone to frame one’s practice requires a certain surrender, and her words have given this body of work a greater gravitas. They situate it thoughtfully, without constraining it.”
In her foreword, Campbell speaks of how the word “spelling” contains the word “spell” within it, ascribing a magical, incantatory power to language. Walking back past that winking face at the entrance of the gallery, you understand what Campbell means. Pintelon’s penetrating words feel like small acts of conjuring that disarm hegemonic narratives, all while never taking themselves so seriously that they lose their inherent humour. Which is her own form of happy rebellion.
No One Can Silence Me by Saskia Pintelon is on view at Gallery Pristine Contemporary, New Delhi, until 28 February 2026.
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