The galerie lange + pult is pleased to present the two exhibitions of Delphine Reist (*1970) and Matthew Feyld (*1985) in Zurich.
In her third solo exhibition, the Swiss artist Delphine Reist leads us through a parcours of her entire body of thought on the basis of polymorphic works from various creative periods. The artist has long been concerned with the consequences of globalization and creates in her exhibition spaces an image of an almost post-apocalyptic world in which the machine has won the battle against man. As if by magic, the machines of Etagère (2007) switch themselves on and off on their own, dancing in front of them in different rhythms. A feeling of powerlessness arises, horrified by the distorted mirror image of our reality of life, in which one, separated by the plexiglass, has not the slightest chance of competing against the machines. Overshadowed by an involuntary standstill, one can neither stop nor accelerate the automated rhythms and only watch nothing good as one’s own inventions leave us inactive.
The Video Pavilion (2011) also criticises the ideology of our working world today: when flags in the style of Chinese shadow theatre imitate manual flag swinging in slow
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The galerie lange + pult is pleased to present the two exhibitions of Delphine Reist (*1970) and Matthew Feyld (*1985) in Zurich.
In her third solo exhibition, the Swiss artist Delphine Reist leads us through a parcours of her entire body of thought on the basis of polymorphic works from various creative periods. The artist has long been concerned with the consequences of globalization and creates in her exhibition spaces an image of an almost post-apocalyptic world in which the machine has won the battle against man. As if by magic, the machines of Etagère (2007) switch themselves on and off on their own, dancing in front of them in different rhythms. A feeling of powerlessness arises, horrified by the distorted mirror image of our reality of life, in which one, separated by the plexiglass, has not the slightest chance of competing against the machines. Overshadowed by an involuntary standstill, one can neither stop nor accelerate the automated rhythms and only watch nothing good as one’s own inventions leave us inactive.
The Video Pavilion (2011) also criticises the ideology of our working world today: when flags in the style of Chinese shadow theatre imitate manual flag swinging in slow motion in a childlike manner, the objects known from traditional festivals once again fall into the trap of automatism and indirectly refer to the propaganda created by emblems and flags of our mega-corporations today. Enjoliveurs II (2017) takes up this theme and presents an ornamental advertising wall in front of which celebrities can be photographed during a media event. However, it is only at second glance that one realizes that the motif is a printed hubcap of various car brands, which through their repetitions and variants function as a testimony to increased efficiency, excessive performance, and accordingly as a consequence of our drastic consumer behavior.
In addition, if one encounters rubber boots and buckets in the middle of the room, which we have only just encountered in everyday life, the artist models her interior with a concrete mass. The objects known from agricultural work in fields, farms or from fishing are directly associated with the artificially produced building material of the modernized world, and thus completely eliminate the only evidence of the exhibition for a work still man-made. Left behind in total standstill, surrounded by an oppressive emptiness and triumphant by the words “Employees think positively”, the entire staging becomes even more perplexed, for where are the employees of the place of work emptied of life?
In the second room of the exhibition, Ressort III (2015) by Reist affirms the ironic view and transforms car tires sewn together into a blow-up of a giant worm screw, which, as an effective power transmission, is another ingenious invention of our humanity. Already alienated by the form and size, the viewer is curiously confronted with the effects of the technological effects, in particular by the structured and unstable material of the tires, which almost lose their hold due to the absence of their steel wheel. Similar to a tired snake, the Readymade could also incorporate the fatigue of the machine, which in the near future will probably be replaced by even better technologies.
The Canadian artist Matthew Feyld, presented for the first time in our gallery, shows the extremely reduced twelve-part series Untitled (2017). In his meditative work, Feyld questions the relationship between physical material and its perception through his sophisticated technical refinement. Feyld applies 30 to even 100 layers of paint to each of his works, some of which are sanded down so that neither the canvas fabric nor the grain of the wood remain recognizable. He always begins the works with ten to fifteen layers of a black or white Gesso primer and only then superimposes these on thin layers of paint, leaving a dot in the middle or four dots in the corners as traces of his original preliminary work in the monochrome surroundings. The successive layers of paint tend to reduce the size of the dots in the search for the enso. He continues this process until the surface has the desired physical property and the balance between color and structure has been established. This inexhaustible working process promotes the slowing down of the visual experience and makes it difficult for the viewer to draw quick and simple conclusions about what is happening in the painting or what color it is. In particular, the hand-produced dots encourage the viewer to move across the surfaces of the work and closely examine the subtle structural qualities of the images themselves.
Michèle Meyer
