The Shiv, Digital Drawing Output on Phototex, 21" x 21" 2022
15 Bytes, Suzanne Bybee's Lively, Layered Abstracts Go to the Next Level, Review by Geoff Wichert, October 2023
Almost Bit (A Common Outcome), Acrylic, Marker and Grease Pencil on Panel, 30" x 30" 2021
Suzanne Bybee is an artist who makes images of her computational mind at work. If you could read her writing and creative word play, you would find a tangle of ideas interacting. Out of the primordial muck she pulls out surprising points of clarity that delight the brain. Complexity is a joy ride for her as she is the great tangler/un-tangler. Her arsenal is fed by her voracious reading of heavy-duty philosophers and thinkers. So the painted mappings show us where she is at home in the universe, where accident and action intersect, as things bubble and scratch their way up to the surface. She offers them to us on a surface of color and line so we can play too.
- Artist Daria Dorosh, February 2022
Jettison, Oil and Grease Pencil on Powder Coated Aluminum, 30" x 30" 2007
On Suzanne Bybee
Rococo has a bad name. I mean that literally. It’s a name apparently designed to force the mouth into absurd shapes. It’s a shot in the foot for seriousness. You can imagine it being given to a widower’s kitten. (I bet Sting has a child called Rococo).
The eighteenth-century art and design movement given that name (which derives from the French word rocaille, or ‘rock-work’, the sort of wildly complicated grotto carving found in aristocratic glades) has a bad name too, at least among those who think they know better. Few people beyond a certain kind of quivery-lipped octogenarian flock to see Boucher or Fragonard or Nicolas de Largillière (see? Even their names are ridiculous). And yet the kitschy Rococo has had more of a lasting legacy in visual culture than the kitsch-shy would have you believe. The butter-fingered 50s abstractions of Philip Guston owe a lot to the misty pastels of Fragonard and Tiepolo, and you could easily trace a counterpoint to the old macho clichés of Abstract Expressionism in the filigreed Rococo airiness of the great Pollocks, Gorkys and Mitchells, even though that might have sent cauliflower blasts of steam from their ears.
Suzanne Bybee’s works are a kind of graphic Rococo, fusing the liquid line of Tiepolo’s oil sketches with hard-edge drawing out of Aubrey Beardsley. And this pitting of hard against soft, of – in a way – sculptural and painterly, the tight and the loose, gives each of her paintings a sort of comic internal struggle. Bybee’s works stage laconic conflicts between modes of painted communication. Neither wins. In ‘Jettison’ (2007), for example, swirls of gooey blue oil are played off against cartoonish lines that lunge at realism (and just miss; they’re nearly legs). A bramble of nervous line bursts open and nearly becomes writing. Painted onto aluminum, Bybee’s paintings are controlled explosions of intense colour, blasting their strange theatrics into view like a cellar door thrown open.
‘Untitled (floating figures)’ (2005) picks up on the freeform, spidery drawings of Matta and Gorky via the high-vis palette of road signs and warning labels. Microscopic creatures on the brink of form bump blindly into each other against a backdrop of gaping colour, like a sunset in a Tiepolo ceiling. And in ‘Untitled (lined brain)’ (2005), the organ of the title, a bulging wicker basket, fires out a stream of yellow pollen like a loose thought. Fragments of skirting board and cornicing nearly resolve themselves into architectural form, as though waiting to settle down. It’s all shook up. Bybee doesn’t ‘take a line for a walk’: she plies it with gin and pushes it into a swimming pool.
Untitled (lined brain), Oil and Grease Pencil on Powder Coated Aluminum, 30" x 30" 2005
Torrance Art Museum Advocates, TAMA Talks Interview for Baker's Dozen Exhibition, May 27 - June 17, 2023
City of Torrance Community Television, CitiCABLE, Torrance Art Museum Early Summer Exhibitions, May 27, 2023 Opening Night