Rudy Decelière
Reduced Proximity
February 14–May 5, 2013
Opening: February 13, 6:30–8:30pm
Musée Jenisch Vevey
Avenue de la Gare 2
CH-1800 Vevey, Switzerland
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10–6pm
Thursday 10–9pm
Curated by Julie Enckell Julliard
Imagine for a moment that flowers breathe. That leaves dance. That works have quiet voices of their own… The images that Rudy Decelière has gathered together for his installation Reduced Proximity appear familiar at first glance: here a carpet of dead leaves, there an 18th-century drawing with highly dramatic overtones, chosen from the museum’s collections. And yet, mediated as they are by the arrangement the artist invents, these motifs are transformed and soon are but a distant memory. Translated onto a grand scale, the graphic undulations of the drawing now cover an entire section of wall. Dotted with tiny loudspeakers, the wall translates the drawn composition into a coppery fresco: the studded web, which extends across the wall like a vast epidermis, now reflects only the ghost or the abstract imprint of the original graphic forms. We have but to bend our ear, to come close to appreciate the sound it makes: the sound coming from the little loudspeakers. These “piezo elements” transmit the rustling of the dead leaves carpeting the floor and hidden behind the wall of sound. Caught up in the draught from an imposing industrial ventilation unit, the desiccated material vibrates freely.
For his first solo exhibition in a Swiss museum, Decelière has conceived a monumental audio-visual installation that plays with changes of scale and perception. Here, the mobility of the drawn line gives way to the mysterious whispering of tiny loudspeakers, and the quivering of nature replaces the intimacy of the page. Be it aural or visual, from far away or closeby, our sensory perception of the work wavers continuously between nature and construction, narrative and abstraction. Undeniably, the subject matter recalls a romantic vision of the world, the dead leaves unequivocally evoking its ruin, the drawing lamentation and death. And yet, once traversed and denatured by the process of the installation, these images become the emblem of a passage from the real to its abstraction. Where is the boundary between these two ways of perceiving the world? At what distance could we most correctly appreciate that world? In focusing on this fragile and intangible space, Decelière pursues his inquiry into the mechanisms of the sensory. Through a hypothetical combination of technical mastery and poetry, he invites us to immerse ourselves in a fascinating and unfamiliar “unheard” world.
Rudy Decelière (b. 1979) lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.
www.rudydeceliere.net
Publication
Rudy Decelière, Proximité réduite
with a text by Robert Ireland (French/English)
Associated events
Guided tour with Rudy Decelière and Julie Enckell Julliard
February 21, 6:30pm and April 25, 6:30pm
