CHRIS SUCCO

It explains Chris Succo’s need to seek transcendence. He isn’t attempting to readbetween the lines but ascend to a plane where lines cease to exist. Like manymusicians-artists, Succo seeks Hendrixian electronic church—actively contributingto the informal cooperative of musicians performing exploratory music innontraditional settings. For Succo, his papacy is his guitar, paintbrush, silkscreen, andcamera. In the traditional modes of dozen notes (C, D, E, F, G, A and B), we remainlimited in the capacity to imagine. So, when creating new sheet music ofabstracted oil or print, Succo Sounds are bound by neither letters nor tones.Instead, the viewer gets to compose the music, free to deviate from the orchestra inSucco’s own cerebrum chorus.

Regarding the dichotomy of his practice, Succo attempts to reconcile the brain’svisual and vibrative wave states. Picture and sound, represented by figuration andabstraction respectively, bleed together as a thoughtful estuary. When speaking tothe artist this conversion of lightness and darkness (innocence andmalfeasance) is a religious practice. Light in its various modalities—clear,coloured, radiant, glowing, shining, and even blinding—has played a central rolein the histories of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Manichaeism, and Neoplatonicmysticism, as well as in Buddhist and Hindu esoteric traditions, to name only themost well-studied. And to Succo, the paintings and prints act as reverential spots ofcontemplation, but, the religious experience of his work is the porous boundarybetween the contending visual vocabulary. Standing in the middle of his twopractices is precisely the experience he aims to highlight. The viewer mustn’tpick a side, instead vacillating between the two as humans do through the chore ofliving.

Simply speaking, Chris Succo wants you to melt away without judgmentthrough his work.

Leave this world.

And allow yourself to find one that sounds, for the first time, truly real without theboundaries our forefathers created.

• Alexis Schwartz, writer and critic

Press release courtesy Almine Rech. Text: Alexis Schwartz.