The galerie lange + pult is pleased to present the works of Donato Amstutz (*1969), a Swiss artist who lives and works in Paris and Lucerne, exhibited for the first time in Auvernier. An exhibition that transports us to discover his polymorphic works from different periods of the artist’s life and invites us to glimpse the full scope of his artistic reflection.
The trivial images, without quality, immediately consumed, ingested (faces of flesh, men or women exhaling in sleep, ecstasy or agony), that their infinite reproducibility as much as the daily flow, héraclitéen, of ever new images that do not stop soliciting us, promise to reject, to forget, these fragments of bodies (faces with closed eyes; skulls – under any face – exorbitant –; feet that the frontal close-up comes to visageify), these cut pieces all found lying, ready to be exhumed, in newspapers, magazines, pornographic magazines, where the artist likes to draw; such is the gesture – strongly simple and voluntarily impersonal : to do it all over again, without any concern for narrative and expressiveness – to which the artist lends himself in this black work.
So redo, re-produce the detail of a simple newspaper cut, a
LOAD MORE +
The galerie lange + pult is pleased to present the works of Donato Amstutz (*1969), a Swiss artist who lives and works in Paris and Lucerne, exhibited for the first time in Auvernier. An exhibition that transports us to discover his polymorphic works from different periods of the artist’s life and invites us to glimpse the full scope of his artistic reflection.
The trivial images, without quality, immediately consumed, ingested (faces of flesh, men or women exhaling in sleep, ecstasy or agony), that their infinite reproducibility as much as the daily flow, héraclitéen, of ever new images that do not stop soliciting us, promise to reject, to forget, these fragments of bodies (faces with closed eyes; skulls – under any face – exorbitant –; feet that the frontal close-up comes to visageify), these cut pieces all found lying, ready to be exhumed, in newspapers, magazines, pornographic magazines, where the artist likes to draw; such is the gesture – strongly simple and voluntarily impersonal : to do it all over again, without any concern for narrative and expressiveness – to which the artist lends himself in this black work.
So redo, re-produce the detail of a simple newspaper cut, a mediocre printed photograph. But so, after the first alteration that the process of enlargement causes to the image by exhibiting its minimal unity: the pixel, the point, to make the most of the strangely metaphorical power of this logic of the “same”: far from producing a layer, a perfect double, the artist makes them other, transforms them. It is the accidents, the defects that can endow these faces with soul – until they are unloaded – that will decide the choice of the unique image that Amstutz will make, by transferring it to a fabric, his boss, the very canvas of another, ultimate, definitive manual reproduction.
With this embroidery technique, however, Amstutz creates a paradox that is described for the time of the craft crisis. The spectator associates being and reality with photography, embroidery with becoming. The photo and embroidery together, however, make the “fugacity” perceptible in Amstutz’s images.
Expressive and at the same time impersonal, repetitive and opaque at the same time, Amstutz places the coloured threads in perfect and typographic lines and maintains the dialogue with the technical reproduction in a perfect mimeis. He creates both popular and banal prints which, through a paradox of balance between the speed of photography and the slowness of embroidery, thematize and even celebrate time as such.
Under the title of paranoia which is introduced by the large embroidered dictionaries measuring 1 x 1 meter – which remind us of some memories of Olivier Mosset’s famous series by choosing not only the same format but also the same colour scheme – surprisingly ironic and at the same time quite rational, Amstutz devotes himself formally and iconographically to things that we almost never perceive consciously in our daily lives. Erotic images from pornographic magazines and a factual dictionary excerpt, drugs that alter consciousness such as Prozac, Dormikum or Tavor form a rhythmic sequence of images that, while enchanting and disenchantment, are directed against the icons and cultural conventions of our time and make visible the paranoia of our daily lives. Borrowed from the Greek “disorder of reason, madness”, the psychosis of images also leads us by their technique to see the core of paranoia in a tendency according to Arnaud to distort and enlarge the facts, in “an inaccurate vision of humanity” (Seglas) or in an antagonism of the self with external obstacles (Delmas and Boll).
Finally, the disintegration effect that the exhibition of the “undersides” of the embroidery – its reverse of knots and trembling lines – exacerbates: nowhere else than in this texture innervated by the reserves of the fabric, that this filamentous material that has devoured the aspect, is displayed with such clarity, at the same time as the fundamental tactility of this image offered to the secret links of the figurative and the abstract. In this paranoia “out of oneself” of the motif or aspect, the visible is reflected elsewhere. Discreet escape, on what there is here to meditate.
Michèle Meyer
