vivian suter: i am godzilla!

Entering into a Vivian Suter exhibition can be both bewildering and confounding as the multitude of paintings – over 350 in the exhibition at Moderna Museet Malmö – engulf you without a clear beginning or end. Yet if you allow yourself and your gaze to wander freely, you start to notice the colours, details, changes, overlapping. After a while your gaze sharpens. Parts of the suspended canvases bear traces of earth, leaves and branches. And in the seemingly abstract paintings, glimpses of motifs appear, like winding rivers, vegetation or a horizon. The works echo the seasonal and daily shifts in light and colour. Slowly, a non-hierarchical multifaceted installation emerges, where everything becomes one.

There is a tangible spontaneity and physicality in Vivian Suter’s paintings. The wild and the calm are in discourse with each other, creating a sense of movement. Seeing the work, be it individually or gathered in clusters in an exhibition, it is easy to imagine the active physical gesture in the moment of creation. Suter has said that it is like being in a state of trance when she paints. Conscious of her body, of course, but at the same time as if being in a different place. Hanging on the wall, suspended from the ceiling and lying on the floor the paintings overlap, and the front and back, even the spaces in between, emerge with the same power. The boundaries of the canvas do not exist. Neither is it always clear whether a canvas should be shown vertically or horizontally – the space and the context decide. Suter’s paintings, with few exceptions, are untitled and undated, which further emphasises the fleeting and interconnected feeling. All of this together creates a continually ongoing process of transformation. Suter herself expresses it best when she describes her work as part of a “lifetime painting”.

Vivian Suter has been living and working in Panajachel, Guatemala, for over 40 years. The village is on Lake Atitlán, about four hours’ drive from the capital Guatemala City. When I visit Suter in May/June, Panajachel is quite deserted, at least at the beginning of the week. But as the weekend draws closer, the streets, markets and bars become livelier. The climate is pleasant and one day I take an early morning walk down to the lake: in the haze, a hint of volcanoes can be made out on the opposite shore, towering 4,000 metres above sea level. Suter lives on the other end of Panajachel. After passing a couple of houses (Suter’s mother, the artist Elisabeth Wild, lived in the first one until she passed away in 2020), a large winding verdant garden gradually merges with wild nature. Leaf-strewn paths meander through the vegetation opening up to the occasional glade. The attentive eye will notice a fleck of paint on a leaf here, or an abandoned paint can there. This is Suter’s studio and place of work. The first thing she shows me is a fig tree that she fell in love with when she came here for the first time.