'What transports us: Visual Riffing in the Paintings of Gabriela Těthalov'

To approach Gabriela Těthalov’s painterly practice through the concept of visual riffing is to treat each work less as a static image and more as an unfolding phrase: a statement that immediately questions itself, digresses, and returns altered. Her paintings do not simply depict; they talk back to their own decisions. Brushstrokes, smears, veils, and accretions of pigment behave like clauses in a sentence that keeps revising itself mid‑utterance.

Visual riffing: departure, wandering, return

“Riffing” implies a structure that is never fully abandoned, only stretched. In Těthalov’s work, this structure is the initial compositional logic: a chromatic hierarchy, a directional sweep of marks, a provisional division of the surface. The painting begins with a legible order—perhaps a field of muted ground, a cluster of saturated colour, a rhythm of vertical strokes. This is the theme.

The riff begins when the painting departs from its own premise. A colour that was meant to be subordinate suddenly thickens, asserting itself as a block. A line that once anchored the composition is partially erased, leaving a ghost that redirects the eye. These moves are not corrections in the sense of erasing mistakes; they are counter‑statements, improvisational replies to what the painting has already said.

The wandering phase is where Těthalov’s surfaces become most discursive. Layers accumulate not as mere texture but as argumentative pressure. Each new layer both covers and cites what came before. Scraped passages reveal earlier chromatic decisions like footnotes; thin washes allow underlayers to show through as if the painting were remembering its own earlier thoughts. The work drifts away from its initial logic, testing how far it can go without losing coherence.

The return is never a simple restoration. When the painting gathers itself again—through a stabilizing band of colour, a reasserted axis, or a final veil that re‑unifies disparate zones—it comes back changed by its detours. The original structure is still legible, but it has been bent, contradicted, and re‑phrased. The painting ends not where it began, but in a state of altered recognition: we see the initial idea and its revisions at once.

Material accumulation as argument

Těthalov’s surfaces are built through a logic of accumulation as thinking. Paint is not simply applied; it is layered, suspended, scraped, and re‑applied in ways that register as a sequence of decisions. Each layer is a proposition about what the painting might be; each partial erasure is a critique of that proposition.

This process gives the work a distinctly discursive quality. Thickened passages of paint read as emphatic clauses, places where the painting insists on a point. Thin glazes and translucent veils function as hesitations or qualifications—“yes, but also this.” Areas where the surface has been repeatedly worked, sanded, or overpainted become sites of argumentative density, where multiple, incompatible solutions coexist in compressed form.

Crucially, this accumulation does not resolve into a single, authoritative statement. Instead, the painting preserves its own history of disagreement. Earlier chromatic structures remain visible at the edges of newer ones; ghosted lines and residual stains testify to paths not taken. The result is a surface that behaves like a palimpsest of decisions, where meaning emerges not from a final image but from the tension between successive states.

In this sense, Těthalov’s practice resists the fantasy of the decisive gesture. The painting is not the record of a singular, heroic act but of ongoing negotiation—between colours, between densities, between competing compositional logics. Material accumulation becomes a way of thinking in public, an argument conducted in pigment and pressure rather than in words.

Colour as speech, not representation

Within this improvisational grammar, colour functions less as representation than as speech. Těthalov’s chromatic decisions rarely point outward to recognizable objects; instead, they operate as utterances within the painting’s internal conversation.

A sudden incursion of saturated colour—an acidic green, a dense red, a bruised violet—reads as an interruption, a raised voice cutting across a more measured tonal field. Muted or desaturated zones behave like pauses or ellipses, moments where the painting lowers its volume to reconsider. Contrasts of warm and cool, opaque and translucent, bright and dull are not descriptive but rhetorical: they emphasize, contradict, or undercut what neighbouring colours assert.

Because colour is not tasked with depicting external reality, it is free to operate as syntax. A band of colour can connect distant parts of the canvas like a conjunction; a cluster of related hues can form a paragraph‑like block of thought. Repetitions of a particular colour across the surface act as refrains, returning motifs that anchor the viewer’s experience even as the painting’s structure shifts.

This linguistic analogy is not metaphorical in a loose sense; it is embedded in how the paintings are built. Těthalov’s chromatic choices unfold sequentially, each new colour responding to the conditions established by the previous ones. The painting thus becomes a dialogue of colours, where meaning is produced relationally—through adjacency, overlap, and contrast—rather than through reference to an external scene.

Improvisational grammar of the surface

Taken together, these dynamics constitute what we might call Těthalov’s improvisational grammar. Like a musician working within and against a key, she operates inside a set of self‑imposed constraints—limited palettes, recurring compositional motifs, characteristic gestures—only to test their elasticity.

Motivic marks (recurring strokes, smears, or directional sweeps) function as grammatical particles, small units that can be recombined into different syntactic roles.

Interruptive gestures—a dragged line that cuts across a field, a poured stain that ignores prior boundaries—act as disjunctive conjunctions, equivalent to a sudden “however” or “nevertheless.”

Zones of overworking become dense clauses, where the painting’s syntax knots itself, revising and re‑qualifying earlier statements.

Improvisation here is not the absence of structure but its continuous re‑negotiation. The painting’s grammar is learned in the act of looking: the viewer traces how one decision leads to another, how a colour introduced in one corner finds an echo elsewhere, how a buried layer reappears at the edge of a scrape. To read these works closely is to follow the logic of their departures and returns, to attend to how each riff both destabilizes and re‑grounds the painting’s evolving order.

Conclusion: painting as altered return

Through the lens of visual riffing, Těthalov’s practice emerges as a sustained inquiry into how a painting can think itself otherwise. Her works begin with a premise only to wander away from it, accumulating material as they go, and then return in a state of transformed coherence. The surface records this journey: every layer, scrape, and chromatic shift is a trace of the painting’s own self‑argument.

In this process, colour ceases to be a vehicle for representation and becomes a mode of speech—a way for the painting to articulate, contest, and revise its own terms. Material accumulation, far from being a purely formal concern, becomes a form of reasoning, a visible logic of trial, error, and re‑articulation.

To read Těthalov’s paintings, then, is to listen to them: to hear how they depart from themselves, how they wander through their own possibilities, and how they return—never unchanged, always bearing the marks of their improvisational thinking.