"TRANSPARENCIES" RÉGIS COLOMBO

Nachdem Régis Colombo erfolgreich im Cité du Temps in Genf ausgestellt hat, präsentiert er nun exklusiv für den deutschsprachigen Raum seine einmalige Serie "Transparencies" über unsere Webseite ahrendtlocher.ch. 

Im Frühling 2014 wird Régis Colombo seine Werke im Rahmen einer grösseren Ausstellung in Kiew präsentieren. 

FAITH FADING


Eröffnung Samstag 5. Oktober 2013 von 20.00 bis 22.00


Ausstellungsdauer bis 9. November 2013



for english scroll



The Umbrella Kid ist tot - lang lebe Joel Eschbach!



Während der letzten 6 Jahren hat Joel Eschbach als The Umbrella Kid seine visuelle Sprache entwickelt. Dies war seine künstlerische Jugend. 

Fotografie und Skulptur sind für Joel Eschbach Medien, um über die aktuelle Gesellschaft und den Verlust der sozialen Werten zu reflektieren. Seine visuelle Erforschung untersucht das Zusammenspiel zwischen gegensätzlichen, aber uneinander abhängigen Facetten des gleichen Konzepts. Ohne das Böse kann es kein Gutes geben, ohne Dunkelheit, kein Licht. 

Joel Eschbach, der selbst ein chaotischer Optimist ist, schafft in seinen Fotos und Objekten Fokus und Klarheit. Er schafft einen Raum, wo er die dunkleren Aspekte des Lebens erforscht. Einen Angriff auf die schleichende Müdigkeit unseres digitalen Zeitalters. 

Statt aktive Teilnehmer, werden wir mehr zu passiven Konsumenten der Technologie, die uns emanzipieren sollte. Die Arbeiten von Joel Eschbach sind ein Aufruf zu reagieren. Die Ausstellung Faith Fading schafft eine Pause und verlangt, dass wir uns von unserem Bildschirm entfernen, und dass wir die Flut der digitalen Medien unterbrechen. Dass wir bewerten, was wir noch haben, und was wir verlieren können.



www.gallery-daeppen.com



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The Umbrella Kid is dead - long live Joel Eschbach!


‘Faith Fading’, Joel Eschbach’s first exhibition at Guillaume Daeppen Gallery, employs a visual language Eschbach has elaborated over the past six years; now this vocabulary is put to the service of his ideas. If the technique looks familiar, it is because until recently Eschbach made work under the pseudonym The Umbrella Kid and already exhibited at the gallery under that moniker in 2011. The Umbrella Kid had allowed Eschbach the advantages of anonymity while he developed his autodidactic photographic practice. 

This practice is still based upon analogue black and white photography, which the artist now complements with sculptural forms. The photographs are mostly set against raw concrete, which creates a ground against which figures and lines form geometric abstractions as well as figurative forms. There is no digital manipulation involved in his process, but much preparation; shapes are drawn, modelled and constructed, sites located and experiments undertaken before a constellation of elements and the right light conditions bring the image to fruition. The results are spare and stark forms, rich with texture.

Having pared his vocabulary back to its essential elements, Eschbach now uses these forms as vehicles for ideas. The characters, shapes in shadow and drawn lines are enigmatic, but not empty. They are designed to communicate unease and uncertainty. Figures – be they mannequins or models – often facing away from the viewer remain undefined, so they could be anyone, and could indeed implicate the viewer. Different elements of the image can be deciphered as symbols, such as the mathematical sign for eternity, or indeed become symbolic. The bare concrete backdrops evoke the aspirations and the disappointments of Modernist architecture, of the numerous projects carried out in concrete that aimed to transform lives for the better, but ended up building ghettos. And in recent photographic works the artist adds an additional layer of hand-written text, repeated mantras, sometimes quotations, that signal some of his intent.For Eschbach, photographs and sculpture are conduits for concerns about contemporary life, and specifically the loss of social values. “I sow axiology and reap in ashes,” he says. His visual investigation of the origins of values examines the interdependence of notions such as good and evil, polarities that can only be defined in relation to each other. 

Another of Eschbach’s concerns is the increased infantilization of individuals as elucidated by Markus Metz and Georg Seesslen in their recent book Blödmaschinen: Die Fabrikation der Stupidität (Idiot Machines: The Fabrication of Stupidity, 2011). The ease of passage through life in a consumer society lulls us into inattention; freedoms and independence are willingly relinquished because audiences are spellbound by marketing and mass media. Rather than active participants, we become passive consumers thanks to the very technologies that are supposed to emancipate us. Thus Eschbach’s works are a call to arms. ‘Faith Fading’ generates a moment to pause and move away from computer screens and flows of digital media.And then to evaluate what else we have, and could lose.



www.gallery-daeppen.com



GUILLAUME DAEPPEN
GALLERY FOR URBAN ART


Müllheimerstrasse 144 - 4057 Basel 



Gallery hours:
 Wednesday - Friday 17.00 - 20.00


Saturday 12.00 - 17.00