Yves Zurstrassen "Pattern paintings"
exhibition from 13.09.14 to 01.11.2014
We know how sincere the work of this painter is, who has never denied the painting, the real one that connects - through the techniques and materials being used - to the history of the great pictorial manner. His means of expression are simple because traditional, but of a clever conceptual complexity.Tirelessly, for nearly 40 years, he has been working with a very focused way of painting, archiving, cataloguing and documenting his work as a dogged researcher, in his large workshop. As a modern alchemist, Yves Zurstrassen interrogates the material that fascinates him, searching in the movement of his brush, in the plains of roughly sketched shapes and unpolished black to metaphysics in his essential need of painting. In a smart, responsible dialectics he confronts this spontaneous gesture, sometimes violent, but never angry, with the delicate attention of wavy, stellar and volatile floral motifs in repetitive images. It is certainly in the tear - the torn painting - that he expresses this fertile opposition, as well as the deaf and bright clash of white and black.With his characteristic attention to detail and finish, this Gargantua presents us his work, marked by joviality, to his own image. He repeats the stencil patterns to infinity; in variations of the same theme, in which each canvas contains a message, the fruit of his observation of the great universal masters, anonymous or not. Never are the Nabis, the Twombly, the Richter and Matisse far away in his search for archetypal and decorative motifs, facing the bright and lively bustle of the spontaneous generation of forms and glyphs. Yves Zurstrassen paints as he is: true. True as these multiple forms, in this case abused by the fresh tear of the medium itself. Yves doesn’t hide what he borrowed from Japan: the famous Katagami with decorative textile patterns. Humbly he refers to the Aboriginal art in a European creation. There is no pretension, no mystification. Just torn painting in light and shadow, which reveals a new pictorial style.
