REMPLIR LE VIDE : Christian Gonzenbach

For our inaugural exhibition, we have given carte blanche to Swiss artist Christian Gonzenbach, who has offered up, in return, nothing less than a firework display: Gonzenbach’s sculptures in ceramic, aluminium and bronze bear the marks of the fires in which they are forged, while the artifice inherent to pyrotechnics, that ‘ingenious means of action or of trickery’, is similarly present throughout his work. Here then is the artificial, ‘fabricated from all sorts of things, imitating nature’ – or perhaps remaking it. But what nature, exactly? Recalling Lucretius and Ovid, we might reply: the nature of things and of their transformation, of course. This enquiry into the nature of things and of the world is here carried out via their reproduction. And it is to this end that the artist seeks to create ingenious processes of reproduction. Far from a figurative art, this is documentary sculpture. With each step of the operation, the process reveals something new.

And suddenly we see things as never before.  

Christian Gonzenbach’s work is characterized by the artist’s ability to bring forth original and unexpected forms: extracting objects from their primary states, he infuses them with a new dimension whilst nonetheless preserving their intrinsic qualities. His experimental work consists in an ingenious exploration of incongruous materials: “Building on his training as a ceramicist, he tends to create forms through the more or less direct imprint of other forms. The resulting works bear witness to an era – our era – and invite us to decipher them. (1) By working backwards through his subjects and defining them negatively, Gonzenbach creates pieces whose surprisingly familiar initial appearance is immediately and unnervingly contradicted by a series of displacements and inversions in terms of material and scale.” (2) “Materials are articulated with one another through a kind of alchemy, be they cast metal (aluminium, bronze, tin), ceramic, cement, polystyrene, sulphur, or plaster. Like us, these sculptures dialogue with the space that surrounds them, seeking to find their place between excess and lack.” (3)

(1) Jérémie Gindre, Fossiles d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, in: ‘Christian Gonzenbach, Petite retrospective’, Musée des beaux-arts Le Locle, 2006, p.VI

(2) http://ge.ch/culture/oeuvres-du-mois/2011-07/christian-gonzenbach

(3) Christian Gonzenbach on his installation created at Galerie C for the exhibition “INVERSO”, 2017.