Baloise Art Forum: Monica Studer / Christoph van den Berg
Basel, 25 November 2011. The exhibition "Primordial Matter" at the Baloise Art Forum shows new acquisitions of Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg at the Baloise Group Art Collection from 25 November 2011 until 25 May 2012.Primordial Matter
While a brush serves most artists as their stock-in-trade, for Studer/van den Berg it has for many years been the computer. Digital technology is the tool they use to create their works.
The works exhibited here, the colourful “Spells” and the colourless “White Matter”, are part of a new project begun by Studer/van den Berg last year. The object-like shapes recall natural phenomena, organic compounds, clam-like primary rocks and geological formations.
Viewed close up, the “Spells” are computer-generated 3D surfaces, inkjet prints on photographic paper, which are attached to specially sized aluminium supports. The magma-like formations reveal themselves as trompe l’œils in a double sense. Firstly, the object thought to be real is actually a flat surface lacking any structure.
Secondly, this sleight of hand breaks the spell of the connection to an existing reference in reality, since each association to an existing object – a rock, a lump of lava or a clam – fails to take in the fact that one is faced with newly generated, real objects, in effect new creations with a digital origin that force their way into reality, into our world.
Unlike the “Spells”, the 170-centimetre-high work “White Matter”, suspended in the exhibition, does not achieve its fantastic form through a seductive surface, which in contrast is white, reserved and matter-of-fact. Instead, “White Matter” is actually a three-dimensional corpus – a construction of paper that can be clearly seen to be made up of countless small triangles joined together. The construction has all the charm of a carefully thought-out and planned model.
Using digital technology, the quality of a surface and the quality of a solid body can be developed with different programs independently of one another, the processing of the surface and that of the shape can run completely autonomously – something unthinkable in reality, where surface and body exist in an inseparable interacting relationship. Seen in this light, “Spells” and “White Matter” are actually not conventional objects related to the real world, but digital objects.
This is because, while the whole weight of “Spells” is thrown on the seduction of the surface and the body behind it is formless, “White Matter”, conversely, simply fails to achieve a surface, since all attention is directed towards the shape of the body, which is consequentially three-dimensional.
“Spells” and “White Matter” are, in other words, genuinely synthetic apparitions lacking any association to our reality, fascinating in their deceptiveness and at the same time discomforting in their absolute unfamiliarity. Studer/van den Berg play with the irreconcilability of this tension and draw us into their game, not without irony and with circumspection.
Martin Schwander
Exhibition at Baloise Art Forum
25 November 2011 – 25 May 2012
Mo – Fr
8 – 18 h
Baloise Group
Aeschengraben 21, CH-4002 Basel