Works by Susan Cantrick
Susan Cantrick is an American abstract painter whose primary interest is in painting as a structured visual response to sub-linguistic thinking. Her paintings are analogs of her pre-verbal perception that aim to be as articulate as possible, crystallizing the vitality and complexity of emergent cognition.
She lives and works in Paris, France
Education
Cantrick came to the visual arts by way of music, which she studied in the U.S. (B.A. Bennington College, M.A. Peabody Conservatory of Music, Baltimore, MD) and practiced, as a violinist, for over 15 years in both the U.S. and France, where she has lived since 1990.
In 1997, facing chronic tendonitis, she transitioned her creative practice from violin to visual art. She has been working from an independent studio in Paris since 2002.
Cantrick spent a winter residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2004.
Technique
Cantrick's essentially modernist painterly techniques, merging the gestural with the hard-edged, are mediated by post-modern digital interventions. Her hybrid practice favors a stylistic eclecticism that can belie its coherent underpinnings.
The various processes she explores in her work combine elements of structure and freedom.
For the last 10 years, she has been painting from digital studies that are generated from photo-fragments of her previous work. The results resemble what she characterizes as "a gamut of genealogies," paintings that share a common visual ancestry with their predecessors. She recently embarked on the challenge of returning to previously unfinished works, proceeding with new compositions imposed on the already inhabited space. Her various approaches investigate painting as state of mind, process, and object, revealing a connection to ideas about context and the renewal of identity.
Alongside her painting practice, Cantrick creates small-format collages mounted on paper and panel that are often composed of alternate applications of paint and ink-jet printed imagery.
Inspiration
Beyond a love of color and the sensuality of paint, Cantrick's process is driven and defined by her convictions about painting as a form of visual thinking rather than narration, illustration, or critique. As a painter, she thinks in terms of materializing the moment of her perceptual experience when thoughts begin to cohere but before they formulate themselves into language. Though she has occasionally used literature or photos from her environment as points of departure, specific external stimuli are rarely referenced. At the same time, she is aware of how the body and landscape have influenced her preoccupation with how to manipulate flat pictorial space -- how best to show its ambiguities and exploit its complexities.
Relevant Quotes
In a text for the catalog of a 2013 Paris group exhibition entitled “Crossroads,” Françoise Caille wrote:
“Cantrick’s work is characterized by an off-centered hybrid network of organic and geometric structures that seem to be moving beyond the limits of the picture plane. …A geometry that resists the rigor of classic mathematical figures is organized and then undone, favoring aleatoric forms and playing with the power of color contrasts. Out of the chaos and diversity of these structures emerges, however, a form of spatial anchoring: the compositions are stable, barely yielding to the movements that cross them. The work appears to be a constructive game of working out the best equilibrium amongst the forces at play. Cantrick employs at once an architectural approach and the means of a cubist who decomposes and recreates space, in this case fictive… The space is filled with structural richness, building a totality.”
Notable Distinctions
In September 2013 she received the Art Absolument prize at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris.
Exhibitions
Susan Cantrick had her second solo show in Paris in 2007. Since then she has shown regularly in solo and group exhibitions in both France and the U.S.
Collections
Her work has been acquired by ACMIN Vie (Paris) as well as by other private collectors in France, the U.S., and Japan.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2018
Impure Situation(s), Pavé d'Orsay, Paris, France
2015
Libre , Abstract Project, Paris, France
2013
Recent work, ACMN Vie, Paris, France Transitive , Combes Gallery, American University of Paris, France
2012
ponge. pebble. paint , French Cultural Center, Boston, MA, USA
2007
the eye 'goes after', artist’s book of 20 images accompanying 20 poems by Beverley Bie Brahic, American Library, Paris, France
2000
Daily Bred , WICE, Paris, France
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2018
A road not taken, St. Marylebone Crypt Church, London, England
2017
Format de poche, Abstract Project, Paris, France
Fight or Flight, The Painting Center, New York, NY
Ce qui aurait pu ne pas être, Abstract Project, Paris, France
Comparaisons , Grand Palais, Paris, France
2016
Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris, France
2015
Accommodating the mess, Abstract Project, Paris, France
2014 - 15
Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris, France
2014
Guoyi Art Museum Beijing, China
2013
Gift Shop , FRONT Art Space, New York, NY
Holiday Art Show, Giampietro Contemporary, New Haven, CT
Crossroads 2, Galerie octObre, Paris, France
Cvijeta Zuzoric Art Pavilion, Belgrade, Serbia
2012 - 13
Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris
2011
CHIC Art Fair/Rotary Club Notre Dame Auction, Paris, France
2010 - 11
Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris, France
2010
Salon des Artistes du Val de Marne, France
2010, 2013
5x7, Bennington College, Bennington, VT, USA
2009
Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris, France
2008
Art en Capital, Paris, France
Salon d’Automne, Paris, France
2016
Kathryn Markel blog interview
http://www.markelfinearts.com/blog/94/
2014
Daily Serving, Fan Mail feature, online
2013
Crossroads/Croisements , catalog with texts by Françoise Caille
2013
Art Absolument, Focus : Raphaëlle Boutié et Susan Cantrick, issue number 56, nov - dec 2013
2013
INPA 3 , International Painting Annual, 3rd edition, Manifest Gallery, Cincinatti, Ohio, USA
2012
Tabula Rasa , o nline interview, Her Royal Majesty, a Paris - based literary arts magazine
http://www.herroyalmajesty.ca/tabula - rasa/
2013
prix Art Absolument , Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris, France