Yearly Archives: 2015

Catherine Kirchhoff at Galerie ID

Posted on by
Reply
Catherine Kirchhoff 1

Piments, 2014, Acrylic on canvas 200cm x 80cm

I visited Catherine Kirchhhoff‘s website before meeting her at her new exhibition. To be honest, on-line, her work didn’t grab me. It seemed just a bit too close to all those giant-sized, machine-printed photoshopped images that have filled so many galleries in recent years. I saw it as design (albeit pleasing design!) suitable for posters or tee-shirts. When I saw the paintings for real, I changed my opinion. I should have had more faith in the discerning Isabelle Dunkel. These are big beautiful paintings. The exhibition is another hit worth seeing at Galerie ID.

Catherine Kirchhoff 2

O rings, 2014, Acrylic on canvas 120cm x 95cm

Catherine is an art teacher in a local school. She studied fine arts here in Geneva and also in New York and Los Angeles. She has exhibited widely. This is her fourth exhibition at Galerie ID.

Catherine Kirchhoff 3She tells me that, as a child, she loved to do very precise drawings. In adult life, she became fascinated by the design component of advertising. When in New York she realised her talent for working with big bold colours. The flash-of-light moment in which her signature theme was born was in a supermarket. She looked closely at the image of a food item on its packet. The image bore little resemblance to what was inside. Bingo! The stars aligned. Her work is now sought after. No surprise then that she won a prestigious commission for sixteen pictures destined for the walls of the new US head-quarters of Franke Foodservice Systems, the world’s leader in systems and services for the food industry.

In terms of human evolution, taste and smell – our detectors of chemicals – are much older senses than vision. Catherine manages to dislocate the old. She starts with banal images of food and reduces them to two dimensions. There is neither shadow nor perspective. The colours chosen are monotone, unexpected and clash in terms of temperature. Reality is kept at arm’s length. These skillfully displayed, broad canvases leap off the wall at the viewer before the food item is recognised as such. The overall effect is arresting but purely visual. There is no stimulation of appetite. The older senses are not recalled. I even hear a little warning voice that whispers “Don’t eat it!”

Catherine Kirchhoff 4

Noisettes, 2014, Acrylic on canvas 180cm x 100cm

Fearful of irritating my fellow invitees to the opening, I examine the canvases close-up. This is master-class painting. Catherine creates these fabulous, even tones by painstaking application of multiple layers of undiluted acrylic. Not a single brush stroke is visible. The boundaries of the colours are razor sharp. You could still convince me that this is machine-printing.

Catherine recognises that her paintings might be termed “Pop Art.” Jasper Johns claimed that the term means simply “to take something and add to it.” This is precisely what she has done. And I have every confidence that, like so much great Pop Art, her work will end up being reproduced on posters and tee shirts. You first read about it here!

Robert Ramser’s Golden Land with Smiling People

Posted on by
Reply

Welcome to Robert Ramser’s Burma. His up-coming exhibition “A Golden Land with Smiling People” opens at Espace Cyril Kobler on 3rd March.

Robert Ramser 14

One of the white elephants belonging to General Than Shwe. In South-East Asia, white elephants are symbols of power, good luck and political credibility. In reality, they are albino animals with pink-brown skin and pale eyes. The official line, though, is that they are white.

Two years ago, I met Robert at his home and wrote about his mesmerising Asian photography. Last year, at his Holy Creatures exhibition I had the privilege of buying one of his beautiful, atmospheric, hand-developed, black and white prints. Robert is a thoughtful, experienced and creative photographer. His work is always worth seeing.  However, I am a little surprised by the title of his new exhibition. I cannot escape a tiny fear that his fascination for the Far East has led him to exhibit a series of golden temples, water buffalos, happy saffron-clad Buddhists monks and grinning children. This fear, it turns out, is unfounded. The golden land with smiling people doesn’t exist except in photos that Robert doesn’t want to exhibit.

Robert Ramser 15

Kaung Kaung lives in the Le Te Mu monastery. His parents live in Rangoon but don’t have the means to look after him.

Robert’s travels first took him to Burma in 1983. He has returned twelve times. In his medium format, black and white style he really did photograph a golden land with smiling people. He then realised that such images were precisely what the political authorities wanted visitors to take away. “I took many nice photos” he tells me. “But they were too nice! They were not representative. They were not genuine. I wanted to show the crumbling vestiges of British colonialism and the poverty of everyday life.” Determined never to exhibit these photos and equally determined to capture the political realities of Burma, he returned in 2011 and 2012 with this current exhibition in mind.

Robert Ramser 16

Classroom in a christian institution, Kalaw, 2012. Education is, in principle, free in Burma but the teachers are so badly paid that they have to give private lessons as well. The many private schools are only for the privileged. Religious institutions attempt a basic education for children of the most needy families but many such children have to work in tea shops for less than a dollar a day. The education budget is 6% of the total national budget. The army expenditure is 13%: for a country with no enemies outside its borders.

The photos on display in the new exhibition show a surprising change of approach and technique. He has moved not only from medium format film to 35mm SLR digital in colour but also from the aesthetic and evocative to photo-journalism.

Robert Ramser 17

The inner courtyard of Sofaer & Co in Rangoon, 2011. This building dates back to 1906 and housed the interests of Issaac Sofaer, a prominent businessman. After the military take-over of power and expulsion of the owners, it became the office of taxation until the government moved to the new capital Nay Pyi Daw in 2005. Colonial buildings are the property of the government but are left to decay. There is an on-going programme to sell such colonial buildings to foreign companies with a view to creating more desperately needed hotels for tourists.

I’m a great admirer of Robert’s work. Whether illustrating folklore or in pursuit of a political statement, each photo carries a distinct, understated quality.

Robert Ramser 18

Eight-lane highway in Nay Pyi Daw, 2012. The new capital was hastily constructed in the early 2000s in an arid area through fear of an American invasion. The roads are illuminated all night when the rest of the country receives electricity for only eight hours per day.

You can meet this gentle-mannered and versatile photographer at the opening of the exhibition at Espace Cyril Kobler on Tuesday, March 3 from 1800. I’ll be there too!

Tram 12, stop: “Peillonnex”

César Baldaccini’s Directed Pink Expansion

Posted on by
Reply
Directed Expansion 1

“Directed Pink Expansion,” César Baldaccini, 1967, Plastic bin and polyurethane.

I’m back in Stockholm. I decide to take a peek at Moderna Museet. As always, it’s hosting a nice mix of works by pop artists. On the floor of one room is “Directed Pink Expansion.” I do not gasp at its beauty; but the work is arresting in many senses. The entire spilled thing looks messy and sticky; it disturbs and amuses me. I like to have things in order; nice and neat and tidy. Call the cleaners ASAP! But I don’t move on. I become aware of association of thought and emotion unusual in the cool confines of a prestigious gallery.

Directed Expansion 4

Even though I know the structure is made of hard polyurethane (for that is what the little sign says,) I want to poke this goo. An inner voice tells me that it is chewy, edible and maybe poisonous (or maybe all three!) The colour suggests caramel, tomato sauce or blood. Or maybe this is a bin of some awful all-invading toxic waste accidentally knocked over and now polluting the environment? How would the Ghostbusters deal with it?

César Baldaccini (1921-1998) remains a key figure in French contemporary sculpture. This is the guy who, in the early 1960s after visitng a car-crusher, famously exhibited cubes made of compressed cars at the Paris Exhibition. At the same time, he did a number of “expansions.” Wow! Fascinating links! Compression and expansion; pushing together and falling apart; filling and spilling; construction and destruction. Was César buzzing around the basic laws of physics about energy states and everything tending toward chaos? And why do I think of cleaners? Because what they do, in terms of physics, is expend energy to turn a tiny little bit of our chaos-destined universe back into order. I look again at Directed Pink Expansion. If universal laws of physics were in César’s head in 1967, there is something not quite right about the way the work is displayed here. It is on its own thin stage!

Directed Expansion

Photo copyright: César/BUS 2015

Only when I look on-line for other images of this work do I see how it is so much more powerful when displayed in direct contact with the floor. This allows the idea of a real spill, directed or not. If you come across it unexpectedly, you might just call the cleaners and then I bet good old César’s ghost would bust out a smile.