Tectonics. Recent paintings by Sam Melser

Name: Tectonics. Recent paintings by Sam Melser
Start: 2024-11-16T16:00:00+01:00
End: 2024-11-16T20:00:00+01:00
Location: Sihl 13

Schedule

Sat Nov 16 2024 at 04:00 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Sihl 13 | Zurich, ZH

We are delighted to invite you to the Vernissage of New Zealand painter Sam Melser. He will present a number of small and large oil paintings on canvas and will be in discussion with Deborah Schaer of toaa Zurich art collecting network, at 5pm.
Refreshments will be served.
This exhibition is a selection of recent oil paintings that Melser created in his studio in Konstanz. It is another edition of an exhibition (but different works) he did in New Zealand in July of this year but was unable to attend. “Tectonics” refers to the shifting geologies and anatomies we all experience, it is a metaphor for the passage of time - both human and geological. Melser´s painting is a combination of suggestive elements from mineral, human and vegetal realms – an intermediate place somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Forms appear only to disappear shortly after. A suggestion of a body, a limb, a rock, a landscape or a mouth, for example, remains a suggestion – nothing more, nothing less.
In his painting, Melser leaves interpretative gaps for the viewer to fill and distances himself from any specific meaning. He notes “I prefer to float in a universe of becoming and transition that is not situated in any particular time, or place - to imagine a world without humans, perhaps long before or maybe long after, human life - a world outside the politics of representation. This “unsituatedness” admittedly comes from a place of privilege yet allows a certain freedom or ambivalence of signification – that is best reflected, he finds, in the anamorphic ambiguity of semi-abstract painting.
Melser likes the process of allowing the spectator to project themselves and their imagination, onto his works, to help create the significance of the work and, over time, to build resonance with it. For most of his life, he has found himself integrating into new and different cultural niches, learning new norms and languages only to then struggle to unlearn them. This experience of impermanence and of becoming (something or someone else) he attempts to reflect in his work. Like a rock on a cliff face, human life is subject to cataclysmic forces, to morphological resemblance and to interpretative exaggeration.