‹Mapping›: Beat Brogle, Raffaella Chiara


20.10.–25.11.06


 
In the past years Beat Brogle has established his reputation primarily with complex interactive installations. With the project ‹www.onewordmovie.ch› he tours around the world. It is about the trawling of Internet databases, about the constructing and deconstructing of picture contents. Next to the installation works, the firm artistic ground has always been drawing. After the gallery, still in Thun, had already twice shown drawings from the last years, now large format digital silhouette compositions are presented for the first time. Starting from real silhouettes, Brogle has created tight labyrinths on the computer. In multiple layers he generates a wonder world, which seems very familiar, on the other hand he creates fascinating new ‹realities›. The net structure builds a braiding of association chains, through those the observers has to find his very own way. The second group of works, also exhibited for the first time, is to read in close combination with the project ‹www.onewordmovie.ch›. Pictures, which the artist found by reason of the same search keys on the Internet, he overlaid to compositions. Formed are multilayer worlds of pictures, which orbit manifold the search key.

Raffaella Chiara creates in her drawings, some of them quite large in size, a whole cosmos.

Spatiality is an important subject; systems of architecture are brought together with organic or mineral structures. Produced without computer, the sheets resemble CAD-generated studies of architecture or three-dimensional systems of cards. With a closer look it is revealed there are sites of fractures so to speak. A nature study: mountains are standing on tables, woods are growing in caves, and islands are floating freely in the room. All works have common theme that they are free of any human presence. Indeed the titles or certain structures of architecture refer to civilizations however they are void of human beings. The often-surreal compositions are interlaced with hidden contents. Again and again the artist manages to amaze, by opening a whole universe with a few lines. She succeeds, with smooth pencil or crayon lines and fine coloration. She visualises a wonderful worlds of ideas. Chiara is a narrator of stories, driven by the impulse, to produce new references and by new contextualisation to intervene in the discourse of drawings of the last years.

So both of these artists celebrate the multifaceted possibilities in which to generate new worlds. A successful undertaking even though they use different techniques. ‹Mapping› describes the uncovering of a process, apportion and disclosure – the ideal title to bring the both positions in as regards to content discourse.

Bernhard Bischoff, October 2006