'Soft Approach' Full Exhibition Film, Galerie Marguo 2021
Galerie Marguo is pleased to present Soft Approach, a selection of new paintings by Icelandic artist Steingrímur Gauti. On view from 4 September to 9 October 2021, this is the artist’s first solo exhibition outside Iceland.
Spackled across the gallery’s walls are twenty or so expressively charged abstract paintings rendered in a constrained palette of earthy tones. Moving from canvas to canvas, one finds themselves repeatedly steeped in variation upon variation of gestural dabs, drips, streaks, and scratches. Indiscernible underpaintings with shifting grounds generate near monochromatic surfaces of greens, blacks, browns, blues and whites. Occasionally, Twombly-esque scrawls scraped into the paint itself or drawn crudely across its surface in chalk snag the eye, luring it alternatively into the depths of, or superficially across, the compositions.
Perceived as a whole, the volume of works (all untitled, all from 2021) assembled here – a careful harvest of paintings created over the past four months – evince a near-aqueous quality, like swimming through an oceanic expanse. As such, to describe the paintings on view in terms of a particular series, or as belonging to a distinct period of time, would somehow ring false. Like a body of water, each part is a continuation of the whole; a beginning or an end impossible to distinguish.
An inclination toward imprecision, repetition, and slow evolutions; the contemplative resignation to the inexorable march of time; and the disciplined rejection of the ego’s drive for control, meaning- making, and pre-conceptualization are all attitudes encapsulated within Steingrímur Gauti’s ‘soft approach’ to creative practice. Gauti comfortably dips in and out of the river of art history, engaging with the behemoth legacy of Abstract Expressionism at will. Nevertheless, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, you cannot step in the same river twice. And whereas modernist principles of ‘high art’ placed excessive value on the originality of the artist, or the unique work’s capacity to contain entirely within its borders all the transcendental and sublime truths of our existence, Gauti’s canvases couldn’t be less concerned with a reification of the individual or the separation between art and mundane everyday experience. Like Agnes Martin’s sparse, self- effacing, all-over compositions, Gauti’s practice hearkens more directly back to the ancient praxes of Zen philosophy, of which he has been a student for some years. Indeed, Gauti readily admits that his paintings are ‘nothing special,’ rendered and released like passing clouds of thought from a place of inner stillness and emptiness, inspired in equal measure by the classroom decorations at his daughters’ kindergarten, the extraterrestrial landscape of his native Iceland, or Per Kirkeby’s complex abstractions.
Ultimately, the works on view in Soft Approach resist conceptualization. They are a byproduct of the artist’s defiance against logical thought and a cultivated mastery of execution in his craft. Excerpted from the continuous stream of painting whose source is the artist’s studio, these abstract works harness the sense of an eternal becoming. Visually dynamic and nuanced, they are offered up to the viewer as retinal, visceral experiences, to be engaged with however and for however long one pleases.
