Hot Lunch

Pierre Vadi (b 1966 in Sion, lives and works in Geneva) calls his artistic works geopolitical fictions. They often start with alienated everyday things and materialize as installations, objects, or paintings. For the past few years, for instance, he has painted over maps of towns and the countryside, now only recognizable as such because of their special folds, while the motifs of the superimposed painting indirectly refer to the content of the map underlying it. The artistic reinterpretation of everyday objects charges them metaphorically and grants observers a new reading of their environment. Pierre Vadi uses his works as signs that he recombines in each exhibition, in the same way that words can be articulated differently within sentences, generating new meanings. In fact, Pierre Vadi's works in general are very often based on a treatment of text. These literary, scientific, or cultural references serve as points of departure and are sometimes also integrated visually in his work as written characters. Despite the strongly conceptual character of his approach, the power of his works results from their sensual implementation as paintings and sculptures and from their very individual spatial presence.
For his individual exhibition "Hot Lunch" in the Glarus Art Museum, his first in German-speaking Switzerland, Pierre Vadi is planning an installation in the side-lit exhibition hall. He is combining a work created especially for this purpose (chains hanging from the ceiling made of transparent synthetic resin) with existing works (e.g., L’argent [air – capacités pulmonaires moyennes, féminine et masculine] 1997/2000, composed of 40 glass spheres) and has invited the artist Philippe Decrauzat to paint a ceiling mural for it. The painted intervention on the ceiling, which represents a stylized explosion of white particles on a black background, contrasts sharply with the light, transparent objects, the connotations of the content of which, however, are ambivalent and evoke latent tendencies of violence.
Philippe Decrauzat (born 1974 in Lausanne, lives in Lausanne) belongs to the generation of young painters who work in the field of geometric abstraction, with strong references to Op Art. However, his work is not a treatment of the different ideological currents related to the historical development of abstraction, but rather a fundamental questioning of the image – strategies that were mainly created in the Concept Art and in the Pop Art. Decrauzat's references are therefore not primarily to be found in abstract art, but rather in the broader domain of pop culture (music, film, graphic arts) since the late 1960's.