Home here in Paris

Salut chers amis,

Eventhough I am in Paris right now, with endless possibilities of art-stuff to see it still pulls me to the things I know. One of the first things I did when I arrived is to find out if there is a center for swiss culture (there is) and what's it showing. I guess, i did it because it's familiar and a place that you automatically feel connected to. Because in the richness of possibilities here it's hard to decide what to do or see or experience next!

So I allready attended a bunch of stuff there, concerts, readings and such but the thing I'm gonna tell you about was a vernissage.
I had heard about this artist back in Bern, but never really made the effort to go and see his work so I figured I might as well do it here.

Pascal Schwaighofer is an artist from the Ticino in Switzerland and he mostly does installations and sculptures. The exhibition was pretty small, just one room, but the pieces were well chosen and displayed. There were a bunch of his rather well-known works on paper, the maps with the mottled paint on them that remind you of maybe meteorological maps, some clay-pieces on a table and also some small slides on a lit up table.

The clay-pieces in perticular caught my eye. At a first glance they almost look like pieces of fossils or maybe snail-houses. But as you get closer you see that they are just small pieces of clay with the fingerprint of the artist on them. It's kindof a paradox, that the artist would duplicate something as unique as a fingerprint so many times. And the way he does it. It seems, that he forms a big piece in the beginning and then just breaks of pieces of the main part. So in a way he deconstructs everything, that a fingerprint is. Unique and complete. There are no half fingerprints. But Schwaighofer breaks the image of the fingerprint and duplicates it. Very interesting and amazing to look at!

The slides were just a bunch more of these clay pieces to look at. It was a welcomed change to the usual exhibitions where you just have to look - here you could actually touch the pieces and interact with them as you tried to find the most beautiful one on the lit up table. It made you feel like you're in the process of creating the exhibition yourself. It was definetly great.