Exhibition review:
Suzie Idiens’ Basel Series at Void in Melbourne demonstrates a quietly rigorous yet playful understanding of painting as both autonomous object and relational proposition. Although each work asserts itself with clarity and autonomy, the exhibition’s exquisitely calibrated hang allows the paintings to also successfully resonate both dispositionally and poetically between one another and the surrounding architecture of the gallery. The result is an exhibition simultaneously activating the singularity of a “painting in itself” and the expanded nature of “painting beside itself” (where a relational space emerges through adjacency, rhythm and spatial conversation). It is indeed surprisingly rare to feel that the qualities that exist within individual paintings are also so resonant in and with the broader exhibition design.
Materially and conceptually restrained, the works explore a dynamic and mutually insufficient interplay between dominant veiled colour fields and carefully restrained incursions of secondary colour at the margins. The threshold where these colours meet establishes a striking territorial tension. Importantly, the way that the paint continues around the edges reminds the viewer of the necessity of the image/object dialectic in a painting’s thingness. At a time otherwise seemingly dominated by excess, Idiens’ paintings remind us of the value of sustained attentiveness to subtle difference, proportion and atmospheres of relation. Their power lies not in spectacle but in a disciplined sensitivity to how painting can still quietly and effectively think through colour, surface and relation.
Associate Professor Sean Lowry
Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies
Victorian College of the Arts
Basel Series originates in a set of small sketches made in Basel after a visit to the Kunstmuseum - investigations into the formal consequences of a single intervention of a geometric form. One corner removed. A slice, a soft incision, cutting away at the edge. Each painting pursues this singular idea with precision and conviction: a dominant field of thinly veiled colour, held against a restrained incursion of a second colour at the margin. The exacting line where the two colours meet marks a clear delineation of territory on the canvas. Paint continues around the exposed cotton canvas edges, the work asserting itself as an object as much as an image.
At the core of Idiens’ practice is a phenomenological enquiry into how material, form and colour can generate an emotive response when distilled into a simple object. She is interested in the subjective nature of perception and the paradox that arises when viewing minimal reductive art - work that is self-referential and rational in its construction, while simultaneously capable of producing a resonant experience. Colour is understood as form in itself: structural and emotionally subjective - as much a physical presence as the geometry it inhabits. The sliver of a second colour is a counterforce - pressed into the margin or accentuating the larger dominant shape, encroaching on it. The surface becomes a site of transferal, where material presence and felt experience coincide.
Basel Series is a rigorous study in singular focus. Precise and committed, the paintings offer clarity, calm, a space to think. It is along the edge, where two colours collide and hold, that something crystallises. Across the larger fields, the paintings quietly pulse.
For exhibition catalogue and enquiries please contact info@voidmelbourne.org | +61 420 783 562
Void_Melbourne
2nd Floor
190 Bourke Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Thursday - Saturday 12 - 5pm
or by appointment