Suyi Xu 'Solaris' Installed next to Nina Silverberg's 'Shift' (2024)
From soft, beigey-purples and plum-like greys ribbed vaults and columned halls emerge from Solaris’ canvas, bringing the skeleton of a gothic entryway just scarcely into view. Almost as if hiding behind a veil woven of gossamer thread, Suyi Xu’s spectral interiors glimmer from an unknown light, as if enticing the viewer to venture the halls and pass through the corridors they hold within.
Seeking patterns and rhythms that link industrial sites neighbouring her Brooklyn studio and the archaic gothic cemeteries in Greenwood, Xu creates paintings of ‘pure space’. The resulting symmetries of her artworks evoke the sacred geometries and mathematical proportional qualities that connect Eastern to Western philosophies and the natural to the manmade. Forming a dialogue between seemingly disparate spaces, Xu connects these architectures through the ways they express different devotions, belief, and grace and recreates them through arches of warm glowing stone.
While not creating artworks in adoration of any one religion or teaching, she explores places and sites of devotion and belief, interested in how these powerful and reverberant emotions can manifest visually. Her transcendent artworks create liminal spaces, detaching one from the earthly world and the spiritual crisis of contemporary living and suspending them within a journey of reflection. The paths to the wings of the Solaris’ interior stretch beyond the canvas as the viewer advances further, deeper into this space that feels at once familiar and impossible. With the reflected hues drawing one’s eyes to a glowing portal to an unknown world, Xu’s paintings operate as paths into inner worlds as she entrances viewers, invites them into her imagined realms—to let the eyes and spirit drift through hallways, never ending staircases, and ornate entryways.
Xu’s works free themselves from the two-dimensional limitations of hung painting, unspooled through her masterful play with perspective, illumination, and chromatic arrays. Her muted, soft palette just barely etches the pointed arches and entryways into the canvas, keeping this dreamlike state between sleep and wake. Recalling Duchamp’s ‘infrathin’—the most minute degrees and shades of difference that can be easily missed—Solaris encourages you to catch your breath, to embrace this moment of suspension, and enter
(By Teddy Woods)