Thierry Feuz

Thierry Feuz, born in Vienna in 1968, is now based in Geneva. He studied at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Geneva and at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, and he got his MFA at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts HES-SO, Geneva.

The artist has created an ongoing series of paintings—“Supernatural,” “Psychotropical,” “Technicolor,” and now “Gulfstream”—over the past five years. While separated into distinct groups, the paintings in these series share a fundamental characteristic: each successive series appears to magnify the view of the preceding one, as though seen through a microscope. Feuz uses this scientific corollary to reexamine classic conceptions of nature, a force that is at once beautiful and picturesque yet is always already in decay; his combination of abstraction and figuration articulates this deteriorating materiality and permits his investigation into permutations of instability—of perspective, physicality, and organicism.

“The organic paintings are close-ups,” Feuz explains, “[as though] you have entered a landscape and the details of a strange, humid, wet, and dangerous life have become visible.” Feuz’s exploitation of this tension here prefigures his move in subsequent paintings to further abstract his imagery, not only by repositioning his perspective but also by unmooring matter from its setting. Thus, Feuz’s perspectival strategy has affected a specific and rounded vocabulary of picture making.