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Artwork Description

Claudia Comte's Soil Paintings continue a series of works characterized by their fragmented geometric abstractions, each spread across eight 8 cm wide canvases. Comte begins the painting process by treating the eight panels as a unified whole, only to later deconstruct and reassemble them. This approach endows the work with a dynamic modularity that challenges static interpretation and blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture. In this latest series, Comte diverges from traditional pigments, opting instead for a medium as elemental as it is evocative: soil. Sourced from her countryside garden near Basel, the earth assumes a central role in these works, where the tension between nature's resilience and humanity's intervention is embodied in the poetic coalescence of form and substance. Through a painstaking vinyl masking technique, Comte arranges the soil upon the surface, creating intricate oscillations and matrices that echo nature's own rhythms and processes, all encapsulated within the very material that sustains life. Nevertheless, the organic, messy quality of the material is seemingly at odds with the hard-edged patterns meticulously formed by Comte against the pristine white substrate. Conversely, in some pieces, Comte’s gesture is expressive, applying soil to the background in thin washes, resulting in a rich, painterly gradient.