3.12.05–21.1.06

‹[ . . . ]› stand for a space in a text, for the unspeakable or the unspoken, for hidden, mystery, for possible or impossible. The actual exhibition does not ‹remains silent›: Every shown work has to do with ‹Text/Word›, a multi-layered topic, to whom artists approach with media of many kinds (painting, photography, video, sculpture and drawing). ‹Art and Word›, thrilling and cryptically at the same time.

Ruth Buck shows for the first time her complete collected, anatomic lyric. As a diapositive projection appear 80 pairs of words, referring to body parts or organs. From ‹eye-lid› to ‹tongue-tip› Buck has detected funny, but used words and projects them in a slide show to the wall. Thereto the drawing series ‹Welcome› can be seen, fragments of hands resp. fingers that strongly remain, due to their reduced form, of an unknown sign language.

The artist duo COM & COM is represented with three work groups. On one hand there are the ‹Dicta›, meaning epigrams, which animate with their superficial shallow assertions to think, therefore

On one hand there are the ‹Dicta›, so called aphorisms, which are superficial and ostensible, but set observers thinking when reading properly, on the other hand the artists question with ‹Skulls of the Artists›, their own three dimensionally scanned sculls, the artistic self-conception as well as with the race driver music persiflage ‹Side by Side›.

The videos of Bernhard Huwiler astound with their simplicity and wit. At one point the artist tries to create an objective, beautiful piece of art, by pronouncing as slowly as possible the word ‹Beau-ti-ful›, the filming a green parrot talking, whose assertion ‹My Favoured Colour is Green› seems already absurd. Two oil paintings round Huwilers exhibition contribution, self-portraits whilst speaking the letters ‹A› and ‹O›.

Reto Leibundgut let eight women pose naked. On an especially set, made of old materials, the women try allegorising letters on two levels, which make a word together. ‹Sex Sells› puts the game of body letters in a nutshell. His flower intarsia from collected scrap, springing from found flower gobelins, crudely carved in wood, bear witness to Leibundguts infatuation in old and worn material.

The centre of Verena Schwabs works is undoubtedly the video work ‹Study of decline – Torpor›, in which the artist questions the cognition of a real lotus leaf and a filmed one. The wonderful text, spoken by Schwab herself, lets the work drown even more in poetry. Black and white photograhies of a lotus leaf remain of Asian China ink paintings or of pictures from a gone by era.

‹Apocalypse› is written in large letters. Dominik Stauch has hung them into the room as a mobile, spectators move between the alleged apocalypse, become aware of the own downfall or the own valency. The instating flights of the mind are materially converted in Stauch’s ‹Try to Fly›. Infinite loops let the senses rotate; one can so to speak plunge in a broadened sphere.

Bernhard Bischoff, December 2005