Suyi Xu is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her paintings are contemplations on space, interior, and architecture that morph into meditations on color and form. Using a wandering recursive structure akin to dream-logic, she constructs labyrinths that allow forms to emerge intuitively and associations to unfold organically.

Xu’s paintings unfold a series of gridded planes, opening a study on perspective in which shapes and forms emerge from hazy mists. She enacts the ritual of architecture, yet discards the integrity of physics in the process of making—horizon vanishes, perspective spins, interior folds inward, and spatial relations are obscured by sudden bursts of light. Space is experienced not as a static form but as a psychic state and medium for perception.

This gradual process of decreation stems from a desire to reach a state prior to reason and the conscious mind. Her fascination with the void in the center of the canvas is informed by Simone Weil’s spiritual philosophy of undoing the self.

At GlogauAIR, she is developing a new body of work that uses fabric as a metaphor for the materiality of longing. She is interested in the gesture of waiting and thinks of her spatial intervention as building “the ideal environment for the act of painting.” By draping, floating, and suspending white cloth throughout the space, she constructs a composition that becomes kinetic through the activation of light, atmosphere and time.