CLP x Art

Metaphors & Experience

Julien Aubert’s works evokes a sense of unease, a precognition of traveling to a far future where only form and color remain. As if looking through a window from
space, in solitude. “Art is a kind of an optical instrument for me. It allows me to filter and represent under a sensitive form reflection generated through my readings. Those include philosophy or another knowledge, sometimes far from the artistic field. I also use observations from the daily life. In general, I prefer the aims of experience and poetry to those of beauty and purity, I’m always suspicious of dogma.”

*1977, lives and works in Vevey, Switzerland.

Reflection & Form

With a Master Degree in Fine Arts his work ‘total’ is a series of paintings behind glass- i.e. paintings on the reverse side of glass panes creating a mix between the unpredictability of the glass surface and his precise element setting. Sebastian Haas interest in the ambivalence between abstraction and figuration and experimenting with a reduced mode of representation in which the observer, in an element of surprise, recognizes concrete things. Citing the painter Giorgio de Chirico, precursor of Surrealism, as reference, who created perspectival urban landscapes with his metaphysical painting, Sebastian Haas‘s paintings are a contemporary, dystopian update of de Chirico‘s spaces. The artists interest in philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose theory of the society of fatigue describes Western people at the beginning of the 21st century as introspective creatures, afraid of burn-out and other nervous diseases.

* 1992, lives and works in Bern, Switzerland

Trans-human & Plant Life

Sébastien Mettraux is interested in various themes ranging from industrial and functional forms of machines to organic elements of nature. The human figure remains still absent from his work.

The "Vanities" series plays with symbol of the time which passes. He wishes to reinterpret the classic codes of the “Memento Mori” through pictorial compositions combining symbolic flowers, bones, ancient symbols of resurrection and current implants and medical prostheses.

*1984, lives and works in Vallorbe, Switzerland

Absurdities & Precognition

The artist Duo loves telling stories of what is to become. Isabelle Racine and Laura Thiong-Toye revisited the traditional iconic Marseille Tarot cards based on images they instinctively collected. The only elements they kept from the original Tarot deck were proportions and original colors. Everything else was created through dialogue and play between the two. The cards with their specific esthetic measures explore foreign cultures, reinvent. interpret traditional stories and give the viewer different clues and symbols to be able to foretell her/his own future.

*1984 & *1986, live and work in Geneva, Switzerland

New Lifeforms & Protagonists

André Schäffer is a talented self-taught photographer, who integrates sculpture and digital image manipulation to stage scenarios of the everyday mundane, the banal and the absurd.

Using insect-bark as the protagonists, he enables the viewer a different perspective of the future. His confrontation with the process of transition, dying and death makes the hidden visible and point also to beauty of the supposedly ugly. Environmental changes, geopolitical tensions, finite resources are creating a rethinking and restructuring of the status quo. The global system is shaking and with it our place on this planet. Man was never at the center; it was only our imagination of it.

* None of the insects were caught or killed.

*1985, lives and works in Luzern, Switzerland.