Beat Raeber,
 
Photography: Vera Yu, 2019

Rirkrit Tiravanija
The Odious Smell Of Truth
10. Juni 2019 – 31. Mai 2020

N°2. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work is characterised by great versatility and a constant involvement of the viewer – exchange and freedom of interpretation are essential components of his practice. Since the late 1980s, he has been experimenting with open, sometimes surprising formats that question how the classical conceptions of art can be extended, how the boundaries of an exhibition space broadened, and its limiting barriers circumvented. Creating spaces for relationships, encounters and reactions forms the basis of his works. He works with different cultural contexts, linking them and using them as references. As a modern nomad – the Thai artist was born in Buenos Aires and lives between New York, Berlin and Chiang Mai – he uses the distinctive and connecting aspects of Western and Eastern ways of life and philosophies and integrates them into his work. Further influences come from literature, pop and news culture. Exploiting the mechanisms of propaganda or advertising, utilising their effect patterns, such as the oscillation between promises, deception, and applied truths, are key part of his work.

Beat Raeber, Galerie
(off-site venue)
Drahtzugstrasse 67, 4057 Basel

N°1. Over the course of a year, a billboard-sized black-and-white print will adorn the side of a building in Basel. Titled Abstrakt getarnte Bürgerlichkeit and printed onto the plastic canvas used by freight trucks, then strapped onto an aluminium frame, its image is robust yet surprisingly ethereal. Sharp-edged, brilliantly lit architectural forms keenly suggest an actual place, yet are unrecognisable, anonymous — a blown-up detail in which signs of life along with colour have been expunged.

Jan Paul Evers
Abstrakt getarnte Bürgerlichkeit
(Abstract Camouflage)

In an age characterised by its blizzard of images and where photography filters all our experiences, Evers’ images, coolly composed in planes of matte grey, represent something of a rebellion. Their mysterious planes of light and dark upset one’s notion of what a photograph has come to be. For a start, if, as Barthes maintained in Camera Lucida, a photograph is always a photograph of something, then what exactly are the subjects of Evers’ prints? Furthermore, capitalism and cinema have conditioned us to read images as marketing tools and as vehicles of emotion, so how are we supposed to react to these dispassionate surfaces?

Beat Raeber, Galerie
(off-site venue)
Drahtzugstrasse 67, 4057 Basel

Posing questions, of course, is part of the power of Evers’ art: his images cause their viewers to reconsider just what the point of photography is. They cause disquiet too in their quiet refusal to conform or to spell out a meaning — in this politically-charged era Evers signally resists making art a tool for agitprop, however good the cause. Instead, in their laconic aesthetic and extreme reduction of details, his works might be considered a photographic continuation of John Cage’s formulation: “I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.” They are photographs of photographs whose dataset, as the critic Florian Ebner has noted, “is nothing other than the light metered in a digital image — transformed into photographic material, into exposed silver, whose grain is the visible signature of the age of photography”.

11 June 2018 – 31 May 2019
Opening reception:
Tuesday, 12 June 2018, from 7pm

In making his artworks, Evers utilises both analogue and digital technologies in a complex and labour-intensive process that he likens to sculpture. He creates through a process of careful addition and extraction, crafting and constructing a final, unique object in which the chance kinks of light during its making become the picture’s punctum. The corpus of each print — its three-dimensional body — is important. For the first time printed on a tough plastic and at the scale of a building, Abstrakt getarnte Bürgerlichkeit represents a new departure for Evers, taking his photography outside of the gallery and into the public realm where its material form and image can proposition passers-by. 

For inquiries
and available works please contact
Beat Raeber at +41 76 441 5550
or hi@beatraeber.com

How then are we to respond to this piece, hung high in the street? For all their apparent detachment and quizzical inscrutability, Evers’ images evoke moods and conjure a feeling of instinctive familiarity. “I try to produce images that remind you of something,” he has explained; “not of something specific, but a general sense of something.” Perhaps that something is memory itself — so analogous with the medium of photography and heightened by Evers’ idiosyncratic and complex methodology; a photographic project that, in its intensive re-writing, processing and re-processing of found and experienced images alike, approaches the workings of our minds at this particular moment in time as we attempt to store and make sense of more images than ever before.

Text by Gair Burton

Jan Paul Evers, b. 1982 in Cologne, Germany. Abstrakt getarnte Bürgerlichkeit is the first in a ten-year programme of off-site installations at Drahtzugstrasse 67, 4057 Basel produced by Beat Raeber, Galerie, which will reopen in Zurich early next year.

Jan Paul Evers, Sektempfang, 2018, C-Print, 20 x 20 cm / framed 30 x 30 cm, Edition of 20 plus 5 AP