Yves Zurstrassen’s Abstract Paintings

Abstract Painting as Construction and Transformation

IRK Magazine had the opportunity to meet Yves Zurstrassen and visit his studio in Viens, in the Vaucluse region of southern France. There, the Belgian artist opened the doors to his working environment and shared insights into his practice, his methods, and the way his place of work shapes his abstract paintings. Across decades, his work has developed a distinctive logic in which gesture, structure, and process are inseparable. What appears on the surface of his canvases is never a direct trace of the act of painting. Instead, it is the result of layered processes, reversals, and erasures that build time into the image itself.

At the heart of this practice lies a fundamental tension between appearance and disappearance. Zurstrassen builds his abstract paintings through a process that combines brushwork, collage, and masking. Paper elements, often cut mechanically, are placed onto the canvas, covered with paint, and then removed. What remains is not simply an image, but a residue: zones of reserve that reveal the structure of the painting in reverse. The surface becomes a field of temporal inversion, where what is seen is the consequence of what has been concealed.

Rhythm, Repetition, and Musical Structure

This method produces a very particular visual rhythm. Forms seem to emerge simultaneously, as if the painting were continuously reorganizing itself. Rather than a stable composition, each work presents a dynamic field of tensions, where repetition never leads to sameness but to variation. In this sense, Zurstrassen’s practice can be understood as fundamentally musical. Not in a descriptive way, but in its internal logic: repetition, variation, syncopation, and pause structure the image as they would a score.

Music is not a metaphor here but a structural affinity. The influence of jazz, in particular, is noticeable in the openness of the compositions and their capacity to absorb disruption without losing coherence. These abstract paintings do not unfold linearly; they behave more like improvisations within a set of constraints. Each gesture responds to a previous one, while anticipating a future configuration that remains partially unknown.

Inside Yves Zurstrassen’s Studio: A Space of Protocol and Experimentation

During the visit to his studio, this relationship between structure and experimentation becomes immediately tangible. The space is not simply a place of production, but a laboratory of procedures. Surfaces in progress, tools, paper cut-outs, and layered fragments reveal a working method based on accumulation, selection, and controlled removal.

Zurstrassen’s studio reflects the logic of his paintings: organized yet open, precise yet constantly subject to change. Works in different stages of completion coexist, showing how motifs circulate, transform, and reappear. Rather than isolated objects, the paintings appear as part of a continuous process of research.

It is here that the role of process becomes fully clear. The artist does not simply “paint” in the traditional sense; he constructs systems in which each decision produces consequences across multiple layers. In his studio, Zurstrassen tests, adjusts, and reactivates these systems.

The Art of Masking and Revealing

Underlying this apparent freedom is a rigorous system of construction. Zurstrassen’s use of stencils and masking devices introduces a high degree of control into the process. Yet this control is not aimed at fixing the image; it is designed to generate complexity. By covering and uncovering layers, he creates a kind of visual archaeology where the final image holds multiple layers of time. The painting is not a moment, but an accumulation of moments, partially visible and partially erased.

This logic extends to his use of repetition. Motifs circulate across works, reappearing in altered forms, shifted scales, or different chromatic environments. Rather than functioning as signatures, these recurring elements act as variables within a broader system. The artwork becomes a space where each painting resonates with others without ever repeating them exactly.

When Color Shapes Form

Color plays a central role in this structure. Often used in dense or fragmented ways, color is not decoration but a way of organizing perception. Contrasts create rhythm, and changes in tone create depth without traditional perspective. In this sense, color does not follow form, it creates it. This is particularly apparent in the way color interacts with masking and removal. The process reveals not just pigment, but relationships between layers, absences, and overlaps.

A Practice in Continuous Becoming

Despite the complexity of its procedures, Zurstrassen’s work maintains a strong sense of immediacy. His paintings confronts the viewer not with a reconstructed process, but with its condensed outcome. What we see is the intensity of a system that the artist has both executed and partially erased. This ambiguity is central: the painting is simultaneously the record of its own making and the disappearance of that making.

Across his practice, there is also a persistent dialogue between control and openness. The studio follows strict rules, but within them, unexpected things constantly happen. It is precisely this balance that allows the work to remain in motion. Nothing is fully predetermined, yet nothing is entirely random.

---