BUILDING BUILDINGS
Building Buildings is an impression of city dwelling – how we construct, refine, nest, and live in spaces. The familiar escape from the city into the idealistic beauty of nature is reversed, where the artist turns inwards to draw inspiration from the details of everyday surroundings. The two-dimensionality of painting is challenged by releasing flatness and shifting towards volume and texture. Architectural motifs are mirrored through compositional forms, grids, and objects, mobilized by the materiality of paint.
Sueme begins each work by creating an intuitive underpainting, often dividing the surface into two or three coloured segments. These underpaintings act as an initial framework and foundation for patterns and forms to be built upon. As colours are mixed and gathered on the palette, they are applied in varying volumes. These colour relationships question the idea of density, suggesting that they hold a type of gravity – a weight that is visualized in vertical and stacked compositions. The edges of these shapes display traces of electric colours within the layers of paint. This reveal allows us to see the painting process, and calls us to look closer, comparative to an exposed brick wall that does not hide its utility or purpose. We are encouraged to meditate on the complexities of constructing bustling habitats, and what it means to coexist in our environments. Building Buildings reflects on taking solace in where we’ve been mentally and physically during a complex period in our history.