calendario eventi  :: 

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22/10/2010

Two exhibitions

Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

Flurin Bisig
The First Rendez Vous

How do you prepare for the first rendez-vous? You want to make an unforgettable impression, and at the same time, you expect the other person to be every bit as special as you had hoped. Face to face with sculptures by the young Swiss artist Flurin Bisig (Samedan, Switzerland, 1982), Amsterdam’s gallery-goers may find his work enthralling – or who knows, even fall in love with it. Bisig invites our gazes to drift lovingly over the taut lines of his impressive spatial constructs, but at the same time he leads them astray in a labyrinth of paint traces, wooden blocks, and subtle, inconspicuous formal moves. The overall experience thus resembles a quest for an adventurous stability; behind their trashy details and neon colours, these sculptures conceal an almost classical visual drawing.
Through his art, Bisig aims to write a new chapter in the history of sculpture. While respecting the central principle of classical sculpture, the unity of the work, he throws himself into experimenting with contemporary sculptural idiom. His point of departure is always a specific, material reality – a piece of wire, wooden blocks, tables, improvised platforms, or planks of wood – which he transforms in an intuitive but highly concentrated manner, raising it to a more abstract level. His oeuvre is not a set of well-defined subjects, but a laboratory of ideas. Of course, he doesn’t leave everything to chance; his sculptures are more like experimental fields of conceptual and practical possibilities, in which every new work strives for a new dynamic and a logic of its own. In this context, the work often goes beyond the maker’s original intentions, entering into an unexpected dialogue with the surrounding space. Despite the wide diversity of the materials used, they all have one quality in common: their lightness. The emphasis on precisely this quality stems from Bisig’s desire to make objects that are easily portable. Each of his works is therefore somewhere between a representation, a model, and a simple, emphatic presence. It’s as if he’s trying to show us that the point is not the materials, but the possibilities.
According to Bisig, the essential insight of his work is that we don’t see objects and ideas as valuable or irreplaceable until they’re on the verge of disintegrating or disappearing forever. Unwilling to wait for that fateful moment, he incorporates the traces of mortality and decay into his work, echoing the words of Leonard Cohen:

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
[Marta Gnyp]

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Shana Moulton
The Castle of Secrets

Cynthia wanders aimlessly around her house, tries out health-giving creams and the latest household gadgets, reads self-help books and performs a gliding dance through her natural surroundings as if her life depended on it. The hypochondriac housewife Cynthia is the protagonist and alter ego of Shana Moulton (born in the USA, 1976) in the artist’s ongoing series of performances and videos entitled Whispering Pines.

Cynthia seeks self-fulfilment, happiness and reflection by trying out endless self-help books and New Age rituals. In each video she again goes in search of solutions, combining her everyday concerns with a surrealistic aestheticism. In Whispering Pines 11, Cynthia suffers a crisis with her health, and rummaging through her medicine chest stumbles on a secret message that will lead her to a cosmic healer. The colourful and graphic setting in Moulton’s video resembles a mysterious psychological space, which has a hypnotic effect partly thanks to its hymnic music. The narrative it evokes borders on absurdism when the separate – often household – objects are deployed in a ritualistic way. Full of New Age mantras, Cynthia strives once more to achieve her goal: unity of mind, body and spirit.

With Whispering Pines Moulton both creates a new world and criticises the existing world – that is, the central importance of the quest for self and its development, which is totally commercialised through the marketing of diverse lifestyles. Although Cynthia believes in the unity of the universe, she lives in a social vacuum. Her world is inward-looking. Even so, the viewer is involved in the work by the sculptural setting in which the videos are presented. For a brief moment we can be part of her quest, in which reality and her specific fantasy world end up, after all, almost converging.
[Laurie Cluitmans]

Image: Shana Moulton, The Castle of Secrets, 2010. Video still.

During the opening, at 7 PM Saturday 23 October, Shana Moulton will do a special performance

Galerie Fons Welters
Bloemstraat 140, 1016 LJ Amsterdam
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday, 13 - 18 pm

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