Untitled

In the early 1980s, the Swiss-Argentinian artist Vivian Suter established her studio in a former coffee plantation in Panajachel, Guatemala, on the banks of Lake Atitlán. This lush, tropical setting, rich in vegetation, wildlife, and Indigenous Mayan culture, has also been marked by a history of turmoil, including the aftermath of the country’s thirty-six-year civil war that ended in 1996. Suter’s profound connection with her natural surroundings underwent a transformative shift following the devastation caused by Hurricane Stan in 2005 and Tropical Storm Agatha in 2010, when vast landslides coated all her works with sludge and ostensibly destroyed them. She initially thought of the muddy traces as destructive damage to her canvases until she decided to embrace nature’s transformative power as part of her creative process. Treating nature as a collaborative partner, Suter now intentionally exposes her work to the elements, moving her canvases between indoor and outdoor environments. They are positioned on the ground or suspended from trees, capturing the imprints of soil, dust, mud, leaves, insects, and the casual presence of her dogs, bearing witness to their own natural evolution and life cycle.

Suter’s predominantly abstract paintings are characterized by roughly handled, heavily worked brushstrokes that impart a sense of rawness and spontaneity to her compositions. The use of natural pigments and colors and the tangled and dense compositions of her paintings evoke the lush vegetation and vibrant colors of her garden. In the exhibition space, Suter’s works are presented in a manner that reflects their creation process. She forgoes traditional stretcher mounts and instead hangs large textile sheets loosely on walls or from the ceiling, sometimes overlapping or arranged as immersive environments. This unconventional presentation invites viewers to move through an atmospherically dense world of shapes, colors, abstraction, and environmental traces.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "The Ecologies of Peace", C3A, Córdoba, 2024)