19.8.–24.9.05

With ‹Jumping Reality› the gallery shows a first thematic show with the Berlin based artist Andrea Loux and the artists Andrea Crosa from Genoa and Laurent Schmid from Berne/Geneva. ‹Reality› is and was always an arbitrative factor in visual arts, forming a filter, through which the things surrounding us, will be depicted. Imagined conditions join in, which although pure thought figment, can become airy-fairy life realities. Thus there exists only one objective reality, but uncountable perceptions of it. In ‹Jumping Reality› it is about these differentiated perceptions of ‹Reality›, about the game with familiar and after all perception habits contextualised anew, as well as about the partly plunge in a microcosmic dimension. The hopping of ‹Reality› or the skipping of idem composes thereby the unresisted access to the topic.

Andrea Loux’ drawings and collages seem like stage settings, in which cavorting protagonists of the last decades of the 20th century are. She finds the motives in habitation catalogs of the 70s and 80s, which she overworks skilfully and creates with them surprising and amazing sceneries. The drawings are familiar to us all, even if they often are only reminiscence of passed days. Humans cavort in the works and animate the newly created rooms of the artist. With a complex revision of discovered graphical material, Andrea Loux succeed to tell exciting histories and to abduct the viewers in new worlds.

Andrea Crosas installation ‹Metropoli da Camera›, composed of three-dimensional, painted houses and helicopter noises, communicates the impression, as if the visitors would be flying in a bird’s eye view above a built residential area. Superficial, the artist delves into a dollhouse like minimisations of the painting, but mainly, there are treated questions of urban development and everyday life. His interiors, painted and added, single pieces of furniture, appear illusively real, but emerge as ‹optical illusion› images. Particularly fascinating are the painted helicopters; latter seemed to be floating like nightmares above houses and pieces of furniture.

Laurent Schmid rounds the exhibition down with multipart installations, which are concerned with the mysterious topic of assumed names and displaced identity. First of all there are the mural paintings, which show Chinese ‹paperless› in Paris. Thousands of Chinese immigrants live in the Seine town and live a life, which is parallel or in the underground of the ‹normal› course of life. With wordplays, which correspond phonetically to the Chinese language, reaches a discourse, at the frontiers of tragedy and comedy. Moreover, Laurent Schmid shows a series of photos, which are overworked with Indian ink, all of them kitschy sunsets, which light the multilaterally the complex system of assumed names.

Bernhard Bischoff, July 2005