Vivian SuterTintin Nina DiscoSeptemberSep 9th - OctoberOct 28th, 2023Gaga L.A.

At first glance it would seem that Vivian Suter’s paintings present their strokes, their textures, their colors plainly to the viewer. Then, at a second moment, one observes their error. These are secret paintings.
Behind each painting, other paintings are hidden, or their arrangement makes it impossible to look at them exclusively from the front: one cannot see them completely from a single perspective. Even in those paintings that are apparently resolved and isolated, it is possible to perceive the layers of invisible paintings. And how do you look at the invisible? How do you look at Vivian Suter’s paintings?

Perhaps, more than seeing them, we should try to read them, because Suter’s paintings unfold before our eyes like the pages of a book. Stains, strokes, colors that make up a text that precedes writing. A text, even before words. A secret poem. What does it say? I would not know how to say it, that is to say, I would not know how to translate it, but the ancient animals and plants that still beat in me understand it.

Or not. Perhaps, better, we should not try to read or understand them, just contemplate them. That is to say, the “I” would have to dissolve in the vision of these paintings so that there is no difference between the gaze and what is looked at, that they are already one and the same mystery. Or perhaps it would be necessary to have the delicacy to almost not look at them, to look at them only with the corner of one’s eye, or not to look at them at all, only to guess at them. Like when one perceives the visit of a hummingbird and decides not to turn to look at it so as not to scare it away. There is something of the hummingbird in these canvases, a very swift stillness.

Or perhaps, on the contrary, the best thing to do would be to look at Suter’s paintings with all the attention possible, that is, with all the love possible, to fix their images in one’s memory and then distract yourself with something else. Try not to think about them for a while. Try to forget them. So that their memory, more and more blurred, ferments in the secret strata of the soul, where our most remote ancestors and the beings we loved and lost still breathe. Until one radiant night we see them again transfigured in our dreams.