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3/4/2015

Augustin Rebetez

Galerie Feldbuschwiesner, Berlin

Augustin Rebetez builds a house. Full of dreams, rites, energy, sparks, spiritism, automatic language, contortionists, and monsters. And you are invited.

Feldbuschwiesner is pleased to present FOAM Talent awardee 2013 Augustin Rebetez with his first solo show in Germany.

Trained as a photographer, he also works with stop-motion video, painting, writing and installations. His video works are often set in a lone rural hut in the Swiss Jura mountains, the place he was born. Augustin Rebetez uses all mediums and materials within his reach, and creates nothing less but his own universe

In it you will find: small wounds, splinters, kerosene, skulls. Fake electric chairs vibrating to white noise. Furniture dancing in stop-motion, eating black plastic monsters. Puppets move in rough and runny gestures. They turn into humming machines, transform into birds, and then into a dark mass of primary matter, finally spilling themselves out into the universe. The house becomes a brain. Continuously destroying and creating anew. Augustin Rebetez’ wild and wondrous world gives glimpses of A.R. Penck, Jean Dubuffet, animism, and the dark aesthetic of the Quay Brother’s movies. The Augsburger Puppenkiste, resurrected by an anarchic acrobat.

His art is what happens when white noise cancels out the rules and sets the black bird of your unconscious free; free to play and metarmorphose. Oscillating between the comic and the uncanny. Augustin Rebetez was born in 1986 in Switzerland. Since 2009, he has been regularly showing his work in Switzerland and abroad, alternating between solo exhibitions and collaborative projects. Augustin Rebetez was awarded the Photo Folio Review by the Rencontres d'Arles 2010, The Swiss Photo Award in 2012, the Foam Talent in 2013 and the Vevey International Photo Award 2013-2014. His works are part of the collections of Musée de l’Elysée Lausanne, Musée de l'Appareil Photographique Vevey, Kunst Museum Thun, Credit Suisse, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau, Mudac Lausanne, and Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel, amongst others.

If you could build a house, not considering cost or effort, what would it look like?
My house would be in perpetual expansion. A dockyard with stairs and ladders. It would have secret hatches. Infinite basements. Workshops with low ceilings and medieval blacksmiths. Dungeons with sad girls and empty aviaries. Rasping furniture. Drawers containing others drawers containing mouths. Old boxes full of insubstantial treasures. Epileptic papers, records from another century and dust.

arrière-tête (mécanismes) – what does the title of the show mean?
It means that you have a factory behind your brain.

What do we see in the series of photographs with the same title?
Burned forests. Technological tribes. Incomprehensible tools. Humans trying to become birds. Heads connected to hearts and crosses. Plagues flowing through windows. Unstable cerebral architecture and white teeth.

Your world is choreographed in a wild stop-motion dance. Where does the dance and contortionism in your works origin?
I am working with my own primitivity. I try to shape a twisted and screwy cosmos with my hands. To explore the human being through its body, you need people who know how to use it. Objects and furniture become alive in your work.
I try to do magic, yes.

There are hardly any words or dialogues in your video works. Écriture automatique, automatic language – what do these concepts mean to you?
I do experimental rap with improvised lyrics. I create fragile sentences and new languages composed of noises in mysterious blends.

I am working with the power of the underground machinery inside of me (at the back of my head). What inspires the forms and figures that populate your universe?
I create what I want to see. I have a big backpack full of stuff that evolves constantly. I create poetry. My art is a breeding ground for reverie and the thoughts of the viewer.

You like to use mobiles as an artistic format.
I like birds. I like the clouds when I am in a plane. I like the subtle balance between relationships and the invisible wires connecting us to the others in a constellation. My most beautiful dreams happen when I fly.

What were your nightmares as a child?
I was captured by a witch who wanted to suck my soul. But I killed her and I poured concrete around her carcass.

You are not afraid of the dark.
I am working for the night.

Image: Augustin Rebetez, untitled, from the series arrière-tête (mécanismes), 2014, 100 x 67 cm, Courtesy the artist and FELDBUSCHWIESNER Gallery

Press Contact: Celina Basra | basra@feldbuschwiesner.de

Opening: Sat Apr 4 7pm

Galerie Feldbuschwiesner
Linienstrasse 155
Berlin

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