Image of One Day, After the Rain by Sandra Cinto, courtesy Phillips Collection.

Written by contributor Maggie Lange

Sandra Cinto’s installation at the Phillips Collection has a title that is ambiguously poetic enough to mean nothing: One Day, After the Rain. In the case of her multipart ink and acrylic mural on the walls of the Phillips’s Vradenburg Cafe, the title adds a lovely and natural simplicity to the piece which crawls across the walls showing the evolution of a storm.

Sandra Cinto is a Brazilian artist who creates in a range of multi-media: drawing, painting, sculpture, and occasionally photography. Based in Sao Paulo, she shows her work internationally. Consistent in Cinto’s work is an evocation of a natural and dreamlike environment that One Day, After the Rain captures in its transforming tone.

The center of the drawing is a white frenetic sketch. It is a bright bolt on a navy background. As the painting moves away from the tense center it fades into pale white and blue, punctuated by the cafe’s windows which add natural sunlight to the work. You get a sense that the rays of the sun are helping to clear away the storm. Cinto uses topographic imagery in the mural that gives the ocean waves the look of both mountains and oyster shells, creating a lovely uncertainty of whether you are above sea-level or below it.

Cinto’s piece replaces a previous project in the cafe, Lee Boroson’s heavy and strange Lunar Bower that featured panels of silky and woolen fabrics stretched weightily across the cafe ceiling. Both Boroson’s and Cinto’s installations are part of the Phillips’s Collection Intersections, a project that encourages contemporary artists to explore a mix of old and new traditions and engage museum architecture both in and outside of gallery space. The initiative pays homage to founder Duncan Phillips’ concept of the museum as an “experiment station.” Cinto’s piece, especially, embodies this approach as it beautifully involves the space around it, transforming the whole cafe into a swirling storm.

One Day, After the Rain is on display through December 30, 2013 in the Vradenburg Cafe at the Phillips Collection. The museum is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended evening hours on Thursdays until 8:30 p.m., and on Sundays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Phillips Collection is located at 1600 21st Street, NW. Admission is $12.