LE FEDERAL A SEMEN-CONTRA, NEW ART FROM WESTERN SWITZERLAND

February 5 - March 19, 2011
Opening: Friday, February 4, 2011, from 6pm

Curated by Martin Jaeggi and Denis Pernet

Kim Seob Boninsegni, Natalia Comandari, Claudia Comte, Gilles Furtwängler, Elise Gagnebin-de Bons, Aurélien Gamboni, Vivian Kasel, Balthazar Lovay, Genêt Mayor, Adrien Missika, Guillaume Pilet, Marta Riniker-Radich

In recent years, extraordinarily lively young art scenes have developed in Geneva and Lausanne. Le Fédéral à semen-contra gives fragmentary insight into these scenes. Whether they work figuratively or abstractly, all eleven artists presented here make reference to the visual languages of pop culture in their works—comics, science fiction, graffiti, skater punk, psychedelia. The artists roots in an “off” culture in which art and popular culture cross-fertilize are tangible. At the same time, the works exhibit a drive for formal precision that refers to the tradition of postmodern abstraction in Western Switzerland, to the generations that preceded these local art scenes. This fresh and unpretentious approach relates to a preference for the medium of drawing, for the small objects that hold an important position in the exhibition. Sculptures, paintings, photographs, and digitally produced images appear as well, accompanied by a video program.

The title of the exhibition refers to an African fetish that shows up at the beginning of Raymond Roussel's 1914 novel Locus Solus. Besides a literal reference to Swiss identity, the idea of the fetish allows the fantasy that the exhibited objects have been endowed with a power that goes beyond their capacity for visual seduction and causes the boundaries between the everyday and the extraordinary to be abolished, as in the language of Roussel.