Thomas Sauter

subito presto

April 26 to June 6, 2025
opening on April 26 from 6 to 9 pm

 

At the heart of subito presto is a group of new large-format paintings, complemented by a selection of works from 2007 to the present—an improvised overview of Thomas Sauter's oeuvre, without any claim to completeness, entirely committed to the playful urgency implied by the title. In the process, the consistency and coherence of his painterly approach becomes apparent—an approach he has pursued unwaveringly, regardless of art market trends. Sauter’s painting makes no proclamations, follows no predetermined extrinsic imperatives, but rather explores the possibilities of clearly defined parameters: picture surface, brush and its strokes, gestures, lines, planes, layers—all employed to orchestrate the interplay of color, both as value and as material, bringing them into conversation with one another.

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How, for example, can this dark green, this purple, this violet, this yellow, this orange be related to one another in such a way that a painting emerges from them—a visually coherent whole that holds up under scrutiny and doesn’t dissolve into randomness? The distinction between abstract and figurative becomes irrelevant—a clearly identifiable object is no more than an ensemble of strokes and surfaces; a whirl of brushstrokes might just as well be a landscape. For the pictorial quality of the work, this makes no difference—nothing is communicated in a linguistically definitive sense in either case. In this way, Sauter's paintings are akin to music—they begin where language, where concepts, begin to fail.

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This also contains a sense of defiance, anarchic like his daring color palette: shamelessly colorful, lush, southern, tropical—at odds with discretion and "good taste." In a very distinctive way, Sauter’s painting practice combines excess (in form and color) with rigor (in consistent painterly parameters, in the refusal of opinion and narrative). From this tension it draws its strength and its capacity for further development—a development that unfolds not linearly but cyclically. Certain forms, gestures, and colors keep recurring, as is inevitable given the nature of his artistic inquiries.

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Another field of tension lies in the resonances and references within the works: in their color combinations, their often vegetative-floral lines, their winding growth, the paintings seem to suggest natural contexts and landscapes, as titles like Wetlands, Lilies, Fireflies, Octopus suggest. At the same time, they are highly artificial and invite viewers to place them in art historical contexts —evoking associations with Henri Matisse and Helen Frankenthaler, just as with Tintoretto and Pontormo, and even the formal and chromatic languages of contemporary design. They are as decidedly rooted in the now—including the shamelessly poppy—as they are historically grounded. A wide variety of, at times even antagonistic, ways of seeing flow into Sauter’s painting process and nourish the expansive openness of his works—paintings that continually generate new visual experiences and never exhaust themselves in a single glance.

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Martin Jaeggi

 

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