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22/5/2014

Adrian Schiess

FRAC Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, Marseille

curated by Pascal Neveux

“A Process Tested by Time”

Adrian Schiess, Swiss-German artist, who currently lives and works in the Swiss Jura is no foreigner to our region since he lived quietly in Mouans-Sartoux for twenty years, in total harmony with his paintings and the interior/exterior world of his home-workshop. Thus, residing on the margins of our region’s artistic scene, Adrian Schiess has accomplished major work at an international level, whose breadth can be discovered from Venice’s Biennale to the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris or more recently, Saint- Etienne. In 1996, the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur acquired two significant pieces, Travaux à plat (Peintures) and Couleurs (1994), today the former has been incorporated into the exceptional series of works inside the public and private French collections assembled for this exhibition.

Adrian Schiess occupies a unique position in the landscape of contemporary art. That is what we think to ourselves on seeing the set of his Paintings. He would reply that in fact he doesn’t really have one, that it’s not his concern. In a way, Schiess has always worked off the beaten track. We know what this kind of statement can mean when it is made by a man wholly devoted to his painting, to this project that is akin to a veritable spiritual quest. We can also imagine the misunderstandings that may arise if it does not reso- nate with an attentive reading of his work. For Adrian Schiess, pain- ting has never meant wanting to build an oeuvre. It is above all about following through a vital questioning whose finality is revea- led only as it progresses. And yet an oeuvre there is, prolific and arrayed across several genres and mediums (paintings, photogra- phs, videos, books, multiples), and extremely coherent.

Following the path of this solitary artist concerned essenti- ally with scrupulously recreating his “inner adventure,” the rela- tion that viewers can have with his work is difficult to express, something that has to do with companionship and probably, too, a form of meditation. It soon becomes clear that the work of this humble, discreet and dogged artist has a lot to say to those who have not or only too hastily observed it. These works are a fascina- ting invitation to rethink our relation to the world, our vision of ourselves. For more than twenty years, Adrian Schiess has been pursuing an artistic and spiritual adventure that has never swerved from its original direction, so that we now have a powerful sense of the coherence of both the man and his art.

The exhibition at FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur tries to go back in time, not giving in to the criteria of the retrospective, but at- tempting to offer an original answer to the question of how to com- pose an exhibition, that of an “auteur exhibition” conceived as an apparatus, as a form in itself of which only the artist possesses the conceptual and narrative framework – “a process at work.” These words are particularly enlightening with regard to the way in which Schiess has responded to this invitation to exhibit, as a form in its own right, in the same way as the writing of a novel or the shooting of a film.

The exhibition here is not a discourse on art, it is not a museum lesson or a simple hanging of works from different periods. These large wooden or aluminium plaques covered with industrial paint, most of them subtly gradated, are laid flat on bat- tens of wood, so that they reflect the space and architecture around them. The exhibition truly becomes a narrative form with which the artist unfolds a story, the story of his painting, of what, up to the 1990s, he called his Fläche Arbeiten, and which are now simply called Peintures (Paintings), as if the whole thing was quite natural.

This exhibition gives him a chance to tell his story with “pictures” that are each like a chapter in a book. The quest of the Paintings is presented by using the exhibition resource as a narrative device. If the orchestration of the “pictures” affords the artist the montage of a visual fiction, it is then up to the viewer to continue the adventure on his own. This is where the exhibition becomes autonomous, when the sequence of Paintings, assembled in a certain way, is left to the viewer’s free interpretation, with the visitor constructing the lineaments of a story in the movement from one plate to another, from one motif to another.

For twenty years Adrian Schiess has been tirelessly questio- ning the notion of the “author exhibition” affirmed by many cura- tors and exhibition organisers in the tradition of Harald Szeemann. This notion singles out a signed, conscious practice of exhibition- making within the art ecosystem. In this regard, the exhibition is no longer just a practice, a profession, a simple transient event; it is a poetic form in which the artist shows the very essence of his pro- ject and reveals his own personality.

The work is not only simply confronted with the architecture of the exhibition space, but also becomes the central piece in a per- fectly controlled spatial device. Method, strategy, organisation and procedure are all subtly devised to unfold the works. Nothing is left to chance. Each plate has a history, a filiation, a genealogy, which, up to now, only the artist possessed.

Many of the commentaries made over the last twenty years or more have placed this body of work within a history of contempo- rary art that is far removed from Schiess’s own aesthetic concerns. Dogged and persevering, his position in relation to today’s pain- ting and art is highly personal and unusual. But he has no wish or desire to present himself as some kind of resistance fighter, living and working in the silence of the studio, between Le Locle and Zurich. However, there is a constant will to develop a demanding and exclusive creative process that is not without a certain roman- ticism and an intense sensibility. His is an eternal work in pro- gress which does not seek either to stabilise itself or to define itself, on the contrary: what interests the artist is more to gather together painting and the experience of reality.

Open, intense, dense, the serial dimension of this work affirms, if that were necessary, the existential nature of this artist’s desire to definitively capture time, the time of an imprint, a coloured sensation, a cast shadow, a season.

The random lyricism of the pictorial texture and attentive observation of nature in this poetic and romantic undertaking immediately bring to mind Monet, Bonnard, de Kooning and Twombly. Schiess’s titles do indeed refer unambiguously to nature, to the rhythm of the day and the seasons and, even more, of time and light. Since then, he has multiplied supports, formats, materials and media in order to create painting that he says is “infinite.” Small formats on aluminium, thick patches of paint, fabric, impasto, explosions of colours, inkjet print on canvas, watercolour, but also photographs – Schiess’s works require, above all, to be experienced sensually.

If there is one thing that the history of painting shows us, from Caravaggio to the Impressionists, via Vermeer and Turner, it is that, more than a symbol, light is primarily the essential mate- rial of the painter, but also of the architect and sculptor. Light as a specific artistic material questions the fundamental dimensions of art. Artists use it to determine the conditions of our experiences and shake up our relation to the world, as much as our relation to the work.

Of course, light naturally evokes its corollary: shadow. In his book In Praise of Shadows, Juni’chiro Tanizaki points out that in the East, contrary to Western tradition, shadow is without negative connotations. Indeed, in Japan, darkness is something that reveals beauty: “we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness that one thing against another creates [...] Were it now for shadows, there would be no beauty.”

In the field of architecture, the relation to light is more clearly expressed by the contrast created by daylight playing over a construction: the cast shadows materialise the volumes thanks to the contrast created by the lit zones. For Le Corbusier, “Architecture is the masterful, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light.” This statement and relation could also apply to the architecture of Kengo Kuma – and more particularly his design for FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, which, even before the disco- very of the play of light at work inside the building, raises by the handling of its façade the question of the vibration of light as a spa- tial concept.

We can then understand Schiess’s attachment to architecture and that rare understanding of space which he developed both in the spatial arrangement of his work and in the context of public commissions in which he evinced great intelligence and finesse in cladding architecture both ancient and contemporary in light. Schiess conceives his projects so that they can be experienced as a subject linked to a fragment of landscape. Schiess insists on what is the key fact for him, namely, that “the body completes the work. Without it, the experience does not exist. With the body, it exists in time.” He “felt the need to integrate the individual’s move- ment with the materials of the work”: experiencing oneself, feeling oneself as a subject who is alive, moving and in contact with the exhibition device conceived by the artist.

In this moment of intense questioning of painting, Schiess stands out for his solitary, rigorous and enchanting path, and remains one of the references necessary to the enduring of painting today. To conclude these lines, the obvious thing is to quote Merleau-Ponty, writing in L’Œil et l’Esprit: “Should the world still last millions of years, for painters, if some are still left, that world would still remain to be painted and will end before being comple- tely captured.”

Pascal Neveux
Curator
Director

Extract from a text pending publication Adrian Schiess, Peinture, texts by Denys Zacharapoulos, Pascal Neveux, interview of the artist by Ulrich Loock, Analogues, Maison d’édition pour l’art contemporain, June 2014, ISBN: 978-2-35864-060-2, 28 Euros.

Translation: Charles Penwarden

Publication
Adrian Schiess, Peinture, texts by Denys Zacharopoulos, Pascal Neveux, conversation between Ulrich Loock and the artist, Analogues, maison d’édition pour l’art Contemporain, June 2014, ISBN: 978-2-35864-060-2, 28 Euros.
Book signing event on Thursday 26 June at the FRAC

Presentation of a selection of Adrian Schiess limited artist’s editions
From 24 May to 30 August, at the Documentation Center

Late openings
On Fridays 20 June, 4 July, 8 August, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Free entrance.

Practical Information
From Tuesday to Saturday, 12am to 7p.m.
Closed on Sundays, Mondays and public holidays

Supports
The exhibition received the support of the Swiss Consulate General, Marseille and Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.
In collaboration with Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, Autria.
The Buffet is offered by the Swiss Consulate General, Marseille

Around the exhibition
Adrian Schiess ' collaborations with Public Art
(DRAC, the Var county Council (CG83)
and the city of Six-Fours les Plages.)
22 windows of the collegiate church Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens in Six-Fours-les-Plages, Var, France
Montée du Fort, 83140 Six-Fours-les-Plages
t + 33 (0) 4 94 34 24 75

Communication contact
Marie-Aurélie Elkurd
communication@fracpaca.org
t +33 (0)4 91 90 30 47

Press Contact
David Ulrichs
david@davidulrichs.com
t + 49 (0) 176 50 33 01 35

Press conference: Friday 23 May, 4:00 p.m.

Vernissage: Friday 23 May, 6:00 p.m. Buffet offered by the Swiss Consulate General, Marseille

Frac Provence Alpes-Côte d'Azur
20, bd de Dunkerque - 13002 Marseille
Opening:
From Tuesday to Saturday,
from 12 am to 7 pm.
Closed on Sundays, Mondays and public holidays
Late openings on Fridays 20 June, 4 July, 8
August, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Free entrance.
Prices
full price ticket €5 / concessions €2.5
Free admission upon presentation of a valid form of proof, list available at the entrance of the FRAC.

stampa

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