Disco

Notes on painting

I’ve been thinking a lot about Vivian Suter’s exhibition Disco at Palais de Tokyo since I saw it in June. This show landed somewhere deep, likely because my relationship to painting has changed so vastly since I first saw her work in New York six years ago.

I’ve spent years making paintings with calculated precision — clean lines, controlled compositions, preciously treated surfaces. But walking into that massive sunlit room, surrounded by 493 unstretched canvases swaying in the warm summer air, something shifted. Nothing about those paintings felt guarded. They felt wild. Free. Alive. No single piece was declaring itself more important than the others. It was art as environment, as lived gesture, not as commodity.

Suter paints outdoors in Guatemala, letting her work live in the elements — mud, leaves, wind, rain — embracing what happens to it rather than resisting. It’s a way of working that is porous, trusting, unafraid.

This show was a reminder of why I loved painting in the first place, before the weight of grad school research, market logic and expectation paired with the self-imposed need to always be producing, always be proving something, began to calcify around the joy of making. It’s not lost on me that I’ve never felt more pressure while painting than during the years I spent making work about leisure. That contradiction has always lived at the core of my practice.

But this also a reminder that a practice can shift — from precision to openness, from protection to play. I’ve often said my work is “serious about the unserious,” and I need to remember that more.

It’s no coincidence to be thinking about this now, as the art world descends on Paris for fair season. This is the first time I’ll be attending an art fair since I was so deeply invested in “playing the game.” I’ve stepped away from that world, and it’s a choice I feel good about. I’m not carrying the same weight I used to. I feel invigorated by the growth, by the possibility of what’s to come, by living in a place where art and beauty are valued.

After years of only working in short, bright bursts, I’m finally ready to be painting in earnest again. I don’t know exactly where that leads, and that’s entirely the point.