The Interstice

Palo Gallery is pleased to present The Interstice, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Greek artist Leda Tsoutreli, marking her first solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibition showcases a significant body of work that explores the delicate interplay between art history, gesture, and abstraction. Tsoutreli’s canvases emerge from a sustained dialogue between thought and practice, where the physical act of painting becomes both structure and conversation. Her process is rooted in the immediacy of the gesture, which she sees as a form of personal script. As she explains, “Each gesture has become a form, and each form an organisation, an organisation that creates structure… The impulsivity of each mark brings in handwriting.” This approach transforms her abstract paintings into living architectures built from rhythmic marks, deliberate movements, and the essential small spaces—or interstices—between them. The resulting compositions are frenzied yet intentionally realized, dripping with an originality rare in such a heavily explored genre. Her constructions bring to mind the pulsing moldings of Baroque churches, the playful energy of Rococo paintings, and even the epic history paintings of Rubens. A Hellenistic lushness pervades the work, connecting it deeply to the artist's Greek heritage. This influence is felt in the poetic, rhythmic quality of her mark-making, which echoes the pacing of Homeric verse, and in the sculptural quality of works like The Interstice, which feels like the famed Laocoön sculpture melted into abstract form. This philosophical engagement with form is matched by her evocative use of color to create depth and emotion. “I start to realise space in colour,” she reflects. “The way colour contrasts creates depth… Blue works inwards… Yellow works outwards… Red works inwards and outwards.” This investigation into color’s inherent properties resonates with Tsoutreli’s imagined dialogues with Kandinsky, who viewed colors as carriers of inner motion. In this new series, she channels these ideas into layered surfaces, enveloping viewers in paintings that feel at once intimate and vast. For Tsoutreli, painting is ultimately a form of storytelling without words, a way to map the terrain of personal history. “Each canvas is an exploration of memory, fragmented yet deeply connected to the present,” she says. “I want the audience to feel both the intimacy and expansiveness that painting can hold.” Leda Tsoutreli (b. 2002) is a Greek oil colour painter who lives and works in New York City, New York. Her work explores the tension between spatial excess and the functional limits of the canvas. She draws inspiration from biblical, baroque, rococo and surreal ideologies to construct expansive oil-colour compositions that spill across the two-dimensional canvas. By pushing the boundaries of mark-making, Tsoutreli taps into animalistic and childlike instincts, disrupting the visual dynamics of painting and generating unconventional painterly spaces that challenge the role and extension of the line. She has exhibited at the Dock 72 Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and has been published internationally. Leda Tsoutreli holds an MFA in Fine Arts, Painting from Pratt Institute, New York, 2025, and a BA in Art Direction from Kingston School of Art, London, 2023.

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