In 1977, Ruth van Herpen kissed a white minimalist painting by Jo Baer while it was on view at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. With red lipstick, she left a kiss-mark and smear on the stark white canvas. The owner of the painting asked for a court hearing, and while on the stand Herpen defended, “It looked so cold. I only kissed it to cheer it up.”
Landon Metz has a long history of staining raw canvas. His paintings are defined by restraint, with forms that seem to emerge from the canvas itself. Initially, the works present as abstraction; slowly, the human body emerges. These large-scale paintings are executed in one movement, without alteration. Metz works from life in the studio, drawing the human figure before laying the canvas on the floor and moving pools of pigment across its surface. Gravity, absorbency, evaporation, and time participate in the construction of the image. Control and its relinquishment coexist.
After years of reducing painting to its most elemental conditions, Metz turns his language of reduction toward one of painting’s oldest subjects, the human figure. He asks how little is necessary for a body to become present. The figure is an expansion of his previous language rather than a departure from it. It becomes legible through the same elements that previously produced abstraction: water, pigment, stain, and absence. The figures appear and disappear simultaneously, suspended between image and material. What emerges is neither abstraction nor figuration entirely, but a threshold between the two: the moment matter becomes a body and a body begins to dissolve back into matter. For his New York debut of this new body of work at EUROPA, Metz presents a five-panel work in blue alongside a single painting in red.
Landon Metz is an American artist based in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally, including a solo exhibition at the Museo Pietro Canonica, Rome (2018), and exhibitions at MAC Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Lissone (2025), the Palais des Études des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2022), the Nassau County Museum of Art, New York (2020), and Villa Medici, Rome (2017). In 2019, Metz was nominated for the Prix Jean-François Prat. A monograph on his work was published by Hatje Cantz in 2021.
EUROPA — Cortlandt Alley