The wide brushstrokes of Christine Streuli unfold over her large-format canvases in a fiery, almost musical, rhythm. Her new paintings seem to carry elements from concrete art, with geometric shapes coming together to form their foundation. The artist eventually applies layer upon layer of sprayed-on or overpainted color, heavily disrupting what starts as an orderly composition. The final layer that Streuli applies often includes stickers, adhesive foils which affix color and shapes on the canvas.
mixed media on canvas, 160 × 250 cm
While her paintings may appear impulsive and gestural, transposing a sense of an enigmatic, primordial force, they are in reality based on meticulous planning, including numeric simulations prepared in advance. The role of the digital realm in art and the question of the reproducibility of original gestures in painting are central to Streuli’s work. Her choice of intense, neon colors, the use of repetitive geometric patterns and references from major art movements almost exaggerate her concern with current questions around painting, intensified by the emergence of Artificial Intelligence.
mixed media on canvas, 95 × 56 cm
mixed media on canvas, 95 × 56 cm
The superimpositions make it difficult to separate the background from the foreground, giving the surface of the painting a spatial quality. This is accentuated by the sizes of the canvases that challenge the viewer’s perception of scale, with a visual experience that extends beyond the edge of the picture plane.
Cropping details from larger composition, zooming onto them as they become the center of smaller paintings, pasting adhesive stickers onto the surface of the works… Streuli constantly references the aesthetic features of reproduction, and numeric media. She also allows her forms to be abruptly interrupted by blank spaces that might seem like digital image tears. In doing so she emphasizes the placement of her brushstrokes, bringing forward the details of the background.
mixed media on canvas, 160 × 250 cm
Christine Streuli's work is a fusion of careful planning, digital exploration, and a deliberate challenge to traditional notions of originality in art. Her use of color, form, and layering creates dynamic and immersive visual experiences that invite viewers to engage deeply with her work. As she challenges the boundaries of painting as an artform, Streuli slips into alternates that are in turn absurd, coherent, or deconstructed, effectively performing a balancing act, between eruption and collapse during her creation process.
