» Past exhibitions » This is a Pop world

This is a Pop world

12th November – 17th December 2011

Opening Saturday 12th November h20:00 – 23:00
performance by Elsye Suquilanda

exhibiting
Andreas Fischbach | Isabelle Gabrijel | Vacon Sartirani

Pop music, pop art, pop culture. Pop is a familiar label, describing contemporary complex scenarios, depositary of symbolic plots hardly decodable by the human eye.
Cell63 Art Gallery is proud to present “This is a POP WORLD!”, a three-person exhibition featuring work from Vacon Sartirani, Isabelle Gabrijel and Andreas Fischbach.
Open November 12th through December 17 th , the exhibition aims to focus on the visual saturation of contemporary society through the distinct sensibilities of three artists and their different background.
Shapes, colors and atmospheres borrowed from mass culture, and disposed into a puzzle built up with ironic pieces. A diverse body of artwork revolving around one common topic: alienation. That same alienation generated by the excessive acquisition of goods and artificially created needs, which has reached a point of individual saturation and mental block.

Isabelle Gabrijel
Isabelle Gabrijel lives in Zurich in a big apartment shared with dolls, stuffed animals, aliens, and science fiction heroes. Play pawns with awkward biographies: born in factories, desired for a short time and suddenly sank into oblivion. Objects that tell us about the dark side of consumerism, like few others have the power to do. The artist’s selection is definite, her creatures show the signs of passing time: darkened paints, wobbly limbs, colors that have lost their light. Mr.Spock, Micky Mouse, Superman become models of an unusual photo shoot. Background images turn into emblems of the commercialization process to which we are daily subjected: disinfectant cleaning agents, pink eggs wrapped in cellophane, farmed fish displayed in refrigerator cases. Isabelle’s installations and pictures remind us that the time of innocence is not eternal and tragedy represents a constitutive part of life.

Vacon Sartirani
Coming from pop suggestions, Vacon detaches himself from these influences in a thin but ineluctable way, going towards a more intimistic dimension. From “contaminator” of the surrounding reality and its icons, now he turns his eyes at the inside, at the icons of the soul. Among the sparkling colors characteristic of his early production he picks the more archaic ones. These two colors will follow him during his exploration. The flat color acrylic painting technique, which refers to the origins of pop art, develops in a representation that is not more pop: in fact, if with the label “popular” we mean a message aimed at a public, if not literally “universal”, at least as wide as possible, the mass, Vacon’s work turn to a single observer at a time, like in a whisper. It remains the fascination of an image which, with its carnality and its mystery brought out from the cleanliness of acrylic, calls back to mind the collective unconscious that yes, is a common heritage, “popular”.

Andreas Fischbach
Andreas Fischbach’s art lead us by hand through the stages of a surreal trip towards an utopian future. His narrative installations consist of painted images, theatrical wings on which are superimposed video projections. If the static nature of painted canvas represents a point of departure, a waiting room where we analyze our surrounding reality, moving images represent the next step towards the pursuit of a way out, through the exploration of ourselves. Frame after frame the observer loses his bearings; the hectic flow of video time, echo of the acceleration of contemporary time, discloses the looming illusion of the perception of reality. The spectator comes out from this experience estranged, once again without an arrival point, with the only certainty of a journey to be made.