Untitled

- Painting (Painting)
183 x 173 cm

Vivian Suter paints her canvases and then allows them to come in contact with natural elements. For thirty years she has lived in isolation in the Guatemalan jungle, accumulating canvases, sometimes leaving them out for long periods of time. As a result, Suter does not title or date her paintings. Typically, she leaves the unprimed canvas outdoors on stretchers to absorb the traces of fallen leaves, rain, water, dirt, passing animals, and the marks of her dogs, imprinting the daily life of the Guatemalan jungle onto the surface of each work. In the details of the work, the traces of both brush marks and what may be rivulets of water from rain are present. When the paintings are ‘finished’, she takes them off of the stretchers. Suter always presents her paintings unstretched, often hung from racks or from the ceiling, but also pinned to the wall, creating atmospheric environments that are layered, like the jungle, where one plant is seen through another. She draws her inspiration from the lush vegetation, vibrant flowers, birds, and the constantly changing weather of her tropical habitat. Her abstract paintings do not refer to specific flora, but evoke the living energy of the jungle with their swaths of color, gestural brushstrokes, and organic motifs. While this particular painting may seem to suggest a view through a window, Suter’s work rarely describes specific spaces, but rather tracks the performance of acts of nature. Each painting is a palimpsest, depicting the accretion of time.

Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires but brought up in Switzerland where she trained to be an artist. In 1981 she decided to withdraw from the art world and, starting out in Los Angeles, began a journey south which eventually ended in Guatemala, where she has lived ever since. She bought a property on an old coffee plantation on Lake Atitlán at the foot of a mountain facing two dormant volcanoes, which she shares with her mother, the artist Elisabeth Wild. The Wild family originally came from Vienna and emigrated to Argentina to escape fascism, and then from Argentina to Switzerland to escape from Juan Perón’s nationalization program. Thus, a refugee mentality is deeply rooted in Suter and her work. Her withdrawal from the art world and residence in the tropical landscape of Guatemala has led her to make work that both reflects the environment and represents it. Subjected to hurricanes in 2005 and 2010, when her studio was flooded and her works damaged, Suter had a damascene moment. She realized she had to work with nature, not against it. From then on she began to incorporate nature’s activities into her painting practice. She works on unstretched canvas and leaves it lying or hanging outside, allowing the accidents of natural events, whether the weather or the passing of animals, to shape them. At a time of intense interest in the environment, her work is expressive of the moment; a rejection of culture in favor of nature, and a foregrounding of the impact of nature on the environment.

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