Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art: Susan Swartz’s Renewal at Georges Bergès Gallery
Nature’s Bouquet 80, 2024, Acrylic on linen, 36 x 60 in.
by Robert Curcio, January 2024
On a beautiful fall afternoon in Soho wandering into galleries, I stopped in front of the Georges Bergès Gallery and peered into the gallery to see a tree painting. Quickly I thought this was another tedious landscape painting exhibit. But I took a chance when I opened the door and stepped into the debut solo exhibition of Susan Swartz. Once inside I quickly saw that this was definitely not a tedious exhibit.
Along one wall of the gallery was a beautiful row of small paintings from recent years and from different series entitled Shimmering Impressions, Color Embraced, Emerging Bouquet, and others. Standing back and taking the row in one look they appear as if each one is a still from an action film - just bursting with energy. These small gems are loaded with paint applied in a thick, fluid, and vigorous method by brush, hands (?), and palette knife giving the surface a bas-relief tactile quality that trails off the canvas. The colors range from vibrant to slightly subdued, most take their cue from nature while others appear straight from the tube. The acrylic surfaces with their sheen and highlights reinforce the notion that they are abstractions of a nature rather than representations of nature.
A sumptuous standout of the exhibit is Sunflowers 15, 2024, a painting with its roused background of thick violet paint moving in every direction. Collaged into the background are various bits and pieces of dried sunflowers, stems, branches, petals, seeds, and other things that the artist gathers from her garden and hikes giving the painting an additional personal touch. On top of this dense background are dabs of brilliant green, white, and yellow acrylic straight from the tube resembling petals, as they mingle with the real ones. The overall effect of the surface combining the paint with the collaged materials is even more vivacious than the small paintings. When you gaze into Sunflowers 15, the whole painting seemingly ungulates and glistens as if you were looking out onto a field of sunflowers.
Sunflowers 15, 2024, Acrylic & mixed media on linen, 60 x 60 in.
Nature's Bouquet 80, 2024, is deceptively simple as with many of Swartz’s paintings, which I do not intend as a negative, however, you need to spend time with them and experience a slow seduction building. Swartz is showing the bouquet, most likely gathered by her, which has been unfastened and displayed across the most magical background of a vivid impasto blue. She plays with our perception by mixing nature with dashes and bits of yellow, purple, brown, green, and more resembling petals, stems, and flowers scattered across the canvas giving it a swaying dreamy effect. All of this radiates an almost blinding brilliance like a piece of jewelry or as a backdrop for one of those sexy elegant mysterious perfume ads that are given to a paramour just like a bouquet.
There is a sense of sensuousness in all of Scwartz’s paintings that is subtle and alluring, but is it from nature or the paint? This come-hither flirtation between the viewer and the paintings comes straight at you in Evolution of Nature 27, 2023. It is a blast, dare I say orgasm, of nature and paint with a slight twist – the coloring is subdued. This contained painting at 36 inches square is bursting with leaves, mushrooms, seeds, and other nature stuff (I think I saw some bugs too?) but they are all covered in a creamy veil of white. While still exuberant and thick as ever, the background is restrained in whiteness as much as the natural parts. Over these two white layers, Swartz splattered green, purple, a yellow/orange color, and more, across the canvas.
Evolution of Nature 27, 2023, Acrylic & mixed media on linen, 36 x 36 in.
Then there is the flipside realization to the whole exhibition, the paintings are a memento mori – the transient nature of life – as sunflowers wilt and bouquets quickly die. I sensed this while in the gallery, but perhaps I was mistaken or overthinking the exhibit. Later I discovered in Donald Kuspit’s essay that he explored this same realization as only he can: “Collaged on their vital expressionistic surface, they are memento mori, even as they suggest that the flowers and fruits from which they came are ripe for resurrection.”
In thinking back to that day wondering if I should step into the gallery, I took a step in the right direction. Swartz in this exhibition does not depict landscapes, sunflowers, or bouquets. Nor are they tedious generic garden variety abstract paintings that we have seen for generations. Instead, Susan Swartz paints nature at its most untamed, that of our inner nature of life, death, and renewal.
Read the full digital article here.