Statement

I now start my work in a more intuitive, natural way: building from the raw idea and repeatedly finessing it over many iterations until the result is more refined, more complex, yet also closer to the original thought.  This approach represents an evolution from earlier techniques that relied on a more rigid, initial framework to deliberately constrain the work's direction, and I feel that it more accurately and successfully captures the nuances of my initial inspiration, enabling more delicate themes to emerge and to become integrated into the work as a whole.  Just as a musical composer creates variations on an established pattern, I create shapes from the initial form and then elaborate and extend them to produce many other solutions, changing the composition until the observer can hold multiple different perceptions simultaneously, so that positive and negative space become interchangeable and the viewer's subjectivity is freed to move continually among the shifting layers of the work.

I draw inspiration from a wide and eclectic number of artists and sources, including Matisse and his use of positive and negative shapes and spaces and many of the contemporary minimalists, as well as the patterns and structures present in nature and in the industrial design of many eras.

"Hiding in plain sight beneath the illusionistic surface of Sylvie Zurstrassen’s paintings lies an autonomous world of organic forms refracted and distilled from the keen observation of the natural world, filtered through the eye and sensibility of this supremely talented artist. The multilayered substructure of oblique lines and amorphous shapes creates a scrim of opacity, multiple colors, and drips, behind which we are able to glimpse various elemental forms in nature—from mountains and trees to amoebas and flora—abstracted and apprehended through what at first appears to be a woven textile, painted entirely by hand and often carried out over the course of many weeks. This painstaking method results in a formal examination of painting itself and painting that achieves a level of sophistication that rivals masters such as Agnes Martin, Richard Diebenkorn, and Brice Marden. To engage a work of art by Ms. Zurstrassen is to embark on a visual, spiritual, and emotional journey, but ultimately one of pure aesthetic pleasure."

David del Gaizo
Department of Drawings & Prints
The Metropolitan Museum of Art