For Liste 2022, Sultana is very pleased to present a selection of new and recent paintings by Katelyn Eichwald and Sophie Varin.
Katelyn Eichwald’s (b. 1987, Chicago) enchanting, quiet compositions aren’t painted onto their surface as much as they emerge from their fibers, hovering
tentatively at the surface long enough for us to make out the information they have come to convey. Moving through Castles, Eichwald’s first solo
exhibition in Europe, ensconced by the gallery’s dusty pink walls, the strands of a nebulous story begin to take shape. Escherian fortresses, glimmering
chains, criss-crossed laces and plaited hair are punctuated by tableaux of sylvan animals and delicate flowers. A tender sense of entrapment pervades.
- Melanie Scheiner
Sophie Varin (b.1993, France) likes to describe her canvases as what you see immediately on waking from a dream, when reality is distorted in your
barely opened eyes. In her atmospheric work, the effect is achieved through the vivid greens, oranges and purples of incandes- cent meadows, celestial
pools and magical doors, oneiric situations peopled with blue and violet silhouettes haloed with bright light. The worlds she depicts are vast, yet it is
the miniature that she has chosen as her medium, her postcard works as pocket-sized as a smartphone.
Initially attracted to video and sculpture, Varin turned to painting at the end of her studies in Rotterdam, imagining for her diploma a short
detective novel that encouraged her to develop a more narrative practice. [...] Working rapidly, almost impatiently, in a sort of frenzied spontaneity,
Varin lays down her scenes in a single coat of oil which she dilutes on a non-stretched canvas. [...]At once humble and greedy, Varin saturates her
canvases in paint, which covers the sides and part of the back once they have been stretched onto the chassis.
Today based in Brussels, Varin continues to refine her pictorial rhetoric of imprecision. While her substantial image bank is ever expanding, she
never lets it take over her point of view, always drawing inspiration from the hazy imprint such images leave in her memory. Her meadows are
devoid of flowers, her paths and mountains lose their angularity as though drawn with the rounded strokes of a child, while her interiors are pared
down to the essential, vibrating to the accidents of approximate perspective. As for the little figures that people her scenes, they have become
almost spectral: gender melts away in a process of disembodiment that produces a neutral silhouette, vague and mechanical gestures, and faces
frozen into grimacing masks.
In an era that celebrates the individual identity, Varin swims against the tide, towards the universal, an ideal that as a child she found in folktales.
Drawn into her world, the viewer is caught up in the web of work whose subject and emotion can be neither identified nor authenticated, trapped
as it is in uncertainty, an ambiguity. Instead she haunts the inbetween, where art is at its most fertile.
- Matthieu Jacquet for Numéro
