Paintings
Shy Tidings
The small object like paintings on cardboard packing material feel like artifacts excavated from buried hidden places. They are modern painting “Trautwein style” ...utilizing a substrate of detritus from twenty first century lifestyles, then transformed by the artist’s additive and subtractive process of layering paint in planned accidents. The result is a suite of paintings with luxurious texture, mystery, surface tension and contours we don’t expect to see.
Some works show the wall through the piece, so the negative space behind is vibrating with the painted material. There are no illusions of depth with this kind of painting, it’s just what’s there. Other pieces use tighter weaves almost like fabric. Some look more sculptural where outer frayed edges or animated shapes emerge. Trautwein’s paintings are enhanced by a limited palette, sometimes just black so nothing becomes too worked, forced or complicated. They just breathe and do not demand much other than the viewer’s contemplation.
In Trautwein’s words this work is part of an ongoing exploration of conceptual and post-minimalist painting, much rooted in the process of the now, guided only by the use of the materials and their momentary transformations. These are paintings of transience, impermanence and imperfection. In search for a title, Shy Tidings came in a dream.
Gwen Terpstra, Gallery 60SIX, San Francisco, 2025
Sedimentaion
This work is a continuation of the exploration and process seen in the last series “Into the Unknown”. The painting process is a dance of controlled accidents made with additive and subtractive processes. The artist says about this work, “the series redefines the notion of content elimination and transformation within the field of painting. The resulting "paint overs" or "Übermalungen" represent a transformation, a metamorphosis of content, that transcends the initial source.”
Many of the works feel like they borrow an aesthetic of Asian landscape painting on scrolls but bold color and robust, dense marks replace preciousness. It’s no surprise that images found in nature appear as the artist maintains his process of marrying intention and chance and the result is as evocative, nuanced and fresh as the evolution of a glacier or an instant splash of sunlight or water seen on rock or field. As in an earlier suite of paintings called “Topography”, some works evoke images as seen from above the earth contrasting other works feeling as though a telephoto lens captured the composition in a painted moment.
In Trautwein’s words, "Sedimentation" revolves around the mesmerizing process that occurs when pigments, initially suspended in liquid paint, gradually settle out and come to rest against a physical barrier. This process mirrors the way elements in the natural world settle and evolve over time, ultimately forming new configurations. "Sedimentation" captures various stages of dissolution, moving from form into formlessness, like a snapshot of nature's perpetual cycle of change.
Gwen Terpstra, Gallery 60SIX, San Francisco, 2024