From February 26 to April 9, 2026, Ceysson & Bénétière Lyon is dedicating an exhibition to Swiss artist Mitja Tušek. His work is developed as a quest into the mechanisms of vision and the persistence of forms. Since the mid-1980s, Mitja Tušek’s work has explored the boundary between figuration and abstraction. From his earliest research, he has sought to explore the tension between the rigor of line and the instability of interpretation, questioning the way in which an image emerges or fades away under the viewer’s gaze. This initial reflection crystallized in a series of paintings in which geometric precision became the stage for unexpected appearances.
“At the same time heavy and light, these strictly defined forms, in an uncompromising black, are sometimes betrayed by the combinations in which they fit together: paradoxically, their impeccable compass lines end up producing marks that the viewer’s associative abilities, depending on the distance and angle from which they observe the painting, may or may not assimilate into organs, faces, or improbable figures. Mickey Mouse is not far away—but where the anthropomorphic mouse was endowed with a functional body, these portraits remain devoid of articulation, as if they had not benefited from the Rorschach tests to which they, like everyone else, were subjected.
With this series, Mitja Tušek brings a novel visual solution (clear shapes and colors that change as the viewer’s gaze shifts) to the same set of questions and transplants Shakespeare and Hobbes into the digital universe, which relentlessly erodes the contours of representation.“
Over the years, Mitja Tušek’s painting has moved away from this sharp graphic style toward a more material and layered approach. While some of his initial questions remain, in his most recent works the artist favors a slow elaboration of the image through material where zooming in on detail and working with light are at the heart of the visual ambiguity he creates.
“Mitja Tušek’s painting unfolds in paintings and series nourished by references to art history and European culture, from the Middle Ages to Ensor, via Rorschach tests, whose forms recall the multitude of possible representations and perceptions of an image. Mitja Tušek’s paintings play with the codes of figuration and abstraction: figurative paintings touch on abstraction, while those that appear abstract often feature portraits or landscapes. The materials he uses—wax, lead, interference pigment—contribute, through their power of absorption or reflection, to creating an ambiguous perception of the image; we sense it more than we see it, and yet we retain an almost palpable presence. Several series of large-format canvases showcase the diversity of forms taken by Tušek’s painting. His work shifts the gaze, questioning the image and its double, the medium and its materiality, starting from the smallest fragment of the image, almost a pixel that is zoomed in and enlarged, gaining density through the successive layers applied by the painter over the years.“