GULFSTREAM

new work by THIERRY FEUZ

October 20- December 3, 2005

Thierry Feuz, born in Vienna and now based in Geneva, has created an ongoing series of paintings—“Supernatural,” “Psychotropical,” “Technicolor,” and now “Gulfstream”—over the past five years. While separated into distinct groups, the paintings in these series share a fundamental characteristic: Each successive series appears to magnify the view of the preceding one, as though seen through a microscope. Feuz uses this scientific corollary to reexamine classic conceptions of nature, a force that is at once beautiful and picturesque yet is always already in decay; his combination of abstraction and figuration articulates this deteriorating materiality and permits his investigation into permutations of instability—of perspective, physicality, and organicism.

Feuz’s most magnified works appear in his “Technicolor” series. Here, some sixty or seventy vertical bands of color streak horizontally across the canvas and wrap around the sides and as the colors envelope the edges and disappear around the back, the painting is no longer a flat representation but a three-dimensional object in itself.

“The organic paintings are close-ups,” Feuz explains, “[as though] you have entered a landscape and the details of a strange, humid, wet, and dangerous life have become visible.” Feuz’s exploitation of this tension here prefigures his move in subsequent paintings to further abstract his imagery, not only by repositioning his perspective but also by unmooring matter from its setting.  Thus, Feuz’s perspectival strategy has affected a specific and rounded vocabulary of picture making.