24.3.-13.5.06

Two positions encounter, complement one another, and then grind and become smooth. Both move in the time and yet create timelessness. The works rest like a sign, which radiate on our life, symbol and expression of a time, of a moment. Two artists: The one is Kotscha Reist a painter; the other is Rudolf Blättler, a sculptor and drawer. Kotscha Reists references are photographs, often taken from journals and magazines but some are also private. Rudolf Blättler marks incredible presence with archetypical archaic motifs, like woman or man, which are modelled powerfully.

Rudolf Blättlers figures are often naive- transfigured and reminiscent of statues of gods or African-oceanic wooden sculptures. In addition he shows lucid drawings with ink, light-handed brush paintings. Fragments of bodies are clearly recognisable; often the artist leaves the belonging of their sex open. The earthy colourings prove Blättlers searching of the ‹original› in art. His travels through countries with high cultures let him develop a repertoire of a universal language of forms, which shapes the graphics and plastic work. In Bern are shown eight bronzes; forceful nudes of women in positions of standing, cowering, and laying. The sculptures are mythic images of women, an antithesis to the mirror finish pictures of women in the present age.

Koscha Reist exhibits new oil paintings on canvas and cotton. There exists photographic models that underline the paintings, the artist freely interprets those models and then commits them in a variety of forms to paper. One time shadowy restraining, the next time vibrantly staged, in front of the spectator a whole cosmos of actuality and history expands. In Berne, new pictures can be seen for the first time, by geometrical interference into the image narrative and objectivity, those are burst and questioned, as already done with older works. Koscha’s works are remarkable in the fact that they exhibit landscapes on a large scale and deliver as well interior landscapes. A microcosm of a frozen world in the reality of what is realistic. Art idealism, combined with the lusciousness of nature, and the reality of our time.

Bernhard Bischoff, March 2006