Galeria Filomena Soares is pleased to announce Streuli’s first exhibition in Portugal “Give me more!” with a group of twelve colourful canvas with mixed media.
What I painted are supposed to be stains. It is a liquid paint that has been poured, filled, sprayed and slapped. Everything in motion, everything in action. Greasy stains, dripping tears and dripping paint noses. If the paint in the painting process had not had limited and limited freedom and limited domain through my intervention with stencils, I could also say: All coincidence, everything in flux, booming and proliferating - that would fit well. The liquid paint, however, was guided in its flow by me, it was accompanied and domesticated. The painting pretend "as if".
A gesture: "To express an inner posture" - at least to express the inability of this complex, always ambivalent posture, that is my offer. Finding and inventing possibilities of dealing with colour and paint, with its sheer power of seduction. Finding gestures, doing them, analysing and repeating them. Those that could be relevant in painting, at least as an assertion.
Assertions are true or lie, precise or not. It remains with the gesture.
What happens here is an interrupted and vague back and forth between the different surfaces, the illusion and the attempt - and the failure - to be able to claim a gesture all in all -to create something valid, to show it and to negotiate it again and again. Stains that are not stains. No annoyance on the blouse or on the trousers, but rather a tamed, stenciled form that only gives us an indication of pollution. A signifier for the stain. A signifier for painting.
“Give me more!” can be understood as an invitation to the visitors of the exhibition to reflect on terms such as: Original and imitation, value and revaluation, surface and depth, seduction and conviction.
“Give me more!”, gives me personally the understanding for an excited and critical self-talk, which challenges me as an artist to continue the impulsive and yet so complicated challenge and also the struggle with the free and flowing paint.”