| galerie bertrand & gruner is very pleased to announce the opening of its next exhibition, something left undone - a group show bringing together for the first time work from seven artists, some of whom have never been shown previously in Switzerland.
Encompassing a broad range of style and media, each of these artists weaves something of the obscured yet mysteriously recognizable into the artistic practice. The exhibition leads one to question the reservoir of symbolism that is inherent to mankind, that which inspired Carl Jung to describe as collective unconscious.
The key is to consider the role imagination has had on encouraging myth and legend. As shared fundaments of these fictions translate time and culture, one is challenged by the magnitude and multifaceted configurations they represent of reality.
The complex subtleties linking imagery with symbol and understanding remains a work in progress – it is open-ended and incomplete. Layered associations and allusion, however, when combined with personal account evoke interpretation.
Shannon Bool’s new work, The Hanged Man, can be seen as a reference to man’s drive to account for uncertainty in the potentiality of the real. The painting is derived from the Visconti-Sforza decks of tarot, a divination tool of mysticism that has influenced and inspired the actions of many throughout generations. Bool’s subject matter, however, emanates from beneath the work’s surface and is propagated by symbolic force. In his sculpture, Esagramma, Francesco Barocco can also be read to question the arbitrary and its symbolic force. The work provides form to results from consulting the ancient Chinese oracular tool, the I Ching or Book of Changes. As with the tarot, the many potentials of the real, the everyday, and the moment are manifested - delineated for deciphering.
In a new work that juxtaposes misplaced items forgotten in public library books with drawings that call to mind stream-of-consciousness, Jonathan Hartshorn conjures the playfully random magic of spontaneity underlining Orphic intuition. It is as if magic is also at play in the paintings of André Ethier. His carnivalesque figures appear to populate an enchanted world one best recalls from childhood, filled with fanciful figures.
Steve Bishop’s transmutations of everyday objects – also laden with the stigma of the found object – appear as spontaneous reassessments that provoke the viewer into considering the relay of information through imagery embedded with cultural significance. Jeff Ono’s sculpture resonates a lyrical consideration of its materiality. The elements combine to give form to ethereal sentiments. It is in the viewer that this sentiment resonates. That very relationship of responsibility between artwork and its viewer as participants in the promotion of collective cultural understanding is what Christodoulos Panayiotou orchestrates in his work.
There is an emotional familiarity resounding from these artworks that one can relate to. While viewing them can be both difficult on the eye and the mind, they bring together manifestations of the real that have deep roots in mankind’s unconscious. From such a position of universality we are able to recognize and decipher their collagings of symbolic association. They provide mass to that something which Longfellow objectively described in his poem from which the exhibition lends it’s title, and shed light on the nether regions of the mind’s eye – its uncompromising imaginative source.
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