【 Taipei·DunRen】【Shanghai·The Bund】 Neo-Baroque – Thierry Feuz Solo Show 6.1-7.11

Oliver Orest Tschirky

Oliver Orest Tschirky is a renowned independent curator and art critic based in Zurich, Switzerland. He has served as a curator at the oldest art museum in Switzerland, the Bern Art Museum, as well as at the Kunsthaus Langenthal Contemporary Art Museum. He has also held the position of Dean of the School of Art and Design at the University of St. Gallen, one of Europe's top universities. In addition, he has worked as the Deputy Director of Art Basel, Deputy Director of the Miami Beach Show, and Director of the Artvera Gallery in Geneva.

As an art historian, Oliver Orest Tschirky specializes in the study of modern and contemporary art, employing various sustainable and interdisciplinary research methods. He holds a master's degree in International Relations from the University of St. Gallen, as well as master's degrees in Art History, Philosophy, and Film Studies from the University of Lausanne and the University of Bern. Oliver Orest Tschirky has rich experience in museums and experimental exhibition spaces. Moreover, he is fluent in multiple languages, including English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. He has curated exhibitions, published exhibition catalogs, and organized cultural projects and events.

Thierry Feuz－內在真理的永恆之旅

Oliver Orest Tschirky

Spleen and Ideal

The paintings and objects by Thierry Feuz are a neo-baroque journey in times of post-modern enlightenment. It is neo-baroque because the works are full of opulence, movement and emotions; it is a journey because the associated themes circle from the universe with stars and galaxies to life-size flowers and zoomed blossoms to micro-cosmoses and nano-worlds; it is post-modern because the artistic concept plays with fragmented and deconstructed elements of memory and culture; and finally it is enlightenment because the pictures open the view through a focused rationality to new and complementary realities.

Universal Scenes

The perfect and balanced compositions, the thrilling and audacious color combinations, the use of strong and pure paints, the clarity and cleanness of the structures, the elaborated design of the single painted elements, and the lack of classical perspective, the depth of focus by means of the blurring of some depicted elements are inherent parts of all works. Because the images always oscillate between abstraction and figuration, there is no direct narration but a lot of space for interpretation. Nevertheless the bright colors are spreading out on the canvas like a firework and are generating either biomorphic shapes or, in another series of paintings, geometric horizontal lines. The fascinating pictures with its color explosions and psychedelic plays of colors leave a deep impression without the understanding at first sight what is going on.

In the last five years Thierry Feuz has developed an impressive and rich bunch of series of paintings. Most of the images will be read as flowers, still lifes, landscapes, a crowd of microorganisms under a magnifier, opulent and irregular patterns with blooms or starry night skies. The paintings of the colorful series “Gulfstream” are named after the warm water current of the Atlantic and seem like nature pieces, enchanting flower fields or tropical gardens. The related works “Psychotropical” represent maybe a closer look on vegetation such as a small group of plants or a bouquet of flowers. They express the crazy, the excessive, the uncontrolled and the inconceivable during the flush after having taken hallucinogenic drugs. In the group “Atlas” the plants are more or less regularly distributed on the canvas like a part of an endless pattern or a proliferating network of plants. The “Supernatural” are probably close-ups of particular blossoms and the representation of an artificial world. “Levante” are like portraits of isolated flowers with an mysterious light around its head. The “Technicolor” series are strip paintings with various horizontal color bands what create the impression of a passing landscape like a color movie with a fictive ride through a landscape. They even may tell a little unspectacular but unclear and incomprehensible story. Finally, the “Andromeda“ images with mainly a black background and small white or colored dots can probably be construed as the view upward to the night sky with its stars and planets and are one of the latest inventions by the artist.

Devine Illusion

To create these brilliant and shining paintings, Thierry Feuz has developed his own practice, style and technique. He works with wet on wet acrylic paint and lacquer what means that he puts fluid paint on a liquid ground coat. The canvas has to be located horizontally on a table while he puts the monochrome key lacquer. Therefore, he mostly applies a white, more rarely a black or another very strong base color. Immediately, and before the paint starts to dry, he needs to add the other colors onto the wet ground coat and starts to draw and paint with brushes, little sticks, hair combs, scrapers, knifes, sprays and air brushes as well as other instruments and tools. The great challenge is to keep the smooth homogeneity of the surface and to bring together to an entity the controllable with the uncontrollable of the extremely fluid paints.

He has to work very carefully and precisely because there is no possibility of correction. What once has been painted is meant to stay forever. His challenging goal is to reach perfection in design and color combinations with minimal interventions. Like a conductor wants to manage the momentum of the musicians and to evoke the complete sound, Thierry Feuz wants to give the right amount of the paint with the accurate movement to the perfect position while the amalgamation of the colors has its own dynamic and rules. They mix themselves a little by natural and uncontrollable diffusion. The result leads to color resonance and vibrancy, rhythm, and harmonic tonalities. Additionally, he also has to be in a special mood to do his artistic work, in a kind of mental flow.

Evolution and Revolution

Today, Thierry Feuz definitely is a multicultural world traveler in the matter of art with a very long and impressive curriculum while he still holds his base in the little cosmopolitan city of Geneva. Already during university he started to participate in various exhibitions, received grants and awards and was published in publications. Originally, he was born in 1968 in baroque and glamorous Vienna, Austria, where he grew up and went to school. After his academic studies in art history and history in the cozy city of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, he became student of the Department of Fine Arts at the Geneva University of Art and Design. He specialized in painting, spent an exchange year at the University of Arts in vibrant and dynamic metropolis Berlin and finished his art education finally with a Master of Arts.

Dissolution

At first glance at the joyous paintings by Thierry Feuz the topic is nature, especially flowers and landscapes, even the works are oscillating between figuration, ornament and abstraction. From single blossoms to entire bouquet of flowers, from floating parts of plants to crawling microorganisms, from firmament to linear landscapes, you find all different kinds of illustrations and allusions in the canvases or drawings. But the attentive observer not only sees the bright, shining and joyful play with colors and forms or layers and tomes but also senses the deep and evocative meanings. What seems to be a contradiction between intellect and superficial beauty, in reality is not. Thierry Feuz unifies classical, medieval, baroque, impressionistic, surrealistic and abstract-expressionistic elements with post-modern spirit-of-the-time philosophy and topical cognition.

Flowers of Evil

The historic origin of Thierry Feuz’ flower and landscape pictures can be found in the Latin wall paintings with idealistic gardens and parks or in the architectural element of the arabesque, the decorative flower cirrus. Later follow around 1410 the religious medieval garden of paradise by an unknown master and the spiritual and meaningful baroque Bodegones still lifes by Juan Sánchez-Cotán or Juan van der Hamen y Leon. The impressionist painters like Claude Monet with the water-lilies and Vincent van Gogh with the sunflowers tried to express emotions through flowers. Also the surrealistic landscapes by Max Ernst evoke similarity. The most analogies exist with the abstract expressionists. They contend the energy of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings and drippings or Sam Francis’ clouds, the contemplation of Marc Rothko’s color fields or Ellsworth Kelly’s structural monochromes, as well as the allusion of Cy Twombly’s history paintings or Willem de Kooning’s abstract landscapes. However, when Thierry Feuz paints something comparable to flowers and gardens, then he includes all these topics.

Both seductive and repulsive at the same time are the paintings by Thierry Feuz. “By making art I can live more sensitively but it also costs me a lot of energy”, Thierry Feuz confesses by speaking about his life and work. The ambivalence in the painting is obvious and pervasive for the sensitive observer as in the splendid and poetic images are the existential themes such as beauty, love and death, the decomposition of life and nature, the dramatic process of creation, propagation and decay coherent. Like baroque paintings are expressing triumphant power through dynamic composition and ambiguity, Thierry Feuz is fathoming and sharpening the scope of perception and cognition of the beholder, is breaking boundaries and is creating significance for deep emotions and sensations as well as secret and hidden meanings. With emotive dynamism, intensity and immediacy he tries to communicate something in a subtle way because art should move the observer without being completely clear since art cannot give definite answers but only evoke disturbance.

Oliver Orest Tschirky

Lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. Works as an independent curator and art critic. Oliver has held positions as Curator at the Kunsthaus Langenthal, Vice Director at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, Gallery Director at Artvera’s, Geneva, and Director of the Art Academy of St. Gallen and assistant Curator at the Museum of Fine Art Bern. Oliver Orest Tschirky specializes in modern and contemporary art, he holds a Master degree in International Relations from the Universities of St. Gallen, Switzerland, as well as a Master of Art History, Philosophy and Film Studies from the Universities of Lausanne and Bern, in Switzerland.

As art historian, Oliver Orest Tschirky has extensive experience with museums and experimental exhibition spaces as well as writing and editing exhibition catalogues and other publications and organizing cultural projects and events. He specializes in modern and contemporary art, prefers sustainable and interdisciplinary approaches and communicates in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

Thierry Feuz – Eternal Journey to Inner Truth

Spleen and Ideal 

The paintings and objects by Thierry Feuz are a neo-baroque journey in times of post-modern enlightenment. It is neo-baroque because the works are full of opulence, movement and emotions; it is a journey because the associated themes circle from the universe with stars and galaxies to life-size flowers and zoomed blossoms to micro-cosmoses and nano-worlds; it is post-modern because the artistic concept plays with fragmented and deconstructed elements of memory and culture; and finally it is enlightenment because the pictures open the view through a focused rationality to new and complementary realities.

Universal Scenes

The perfect and balanced compositions, the thrilling and audacious color combinations, the use of strong and pure paints, the clarity and cleanness of the structures, the elaborated design of the single painted elements, and the lack of classical perspective, the depth of focus by means of the blurring of some depicted elements are inherent parts of all works. Because the images always oscillate between abstraction and figuration, there is no direct narration but a lot of space for interpretation. Nevertheless the bright colors are spreading out on the canvas like a firework and are generating either biomorphic shapes or, in another series of paintings, geometric horizontal lines. The fascinating pictures with its color explosions and psychedelic plays of colors leave a deep impression without the understanding at first sight what is going on. 

In the last five years Thierry Feuz has developed an impressive and rich bunch of series of paintings. Most of the images will be read as flowers, still lifes, landscapes, a crowd of microorganisms under a magnifier, opulent and irregular patterns with blooms or starry night skies. The paintings of the colorful series “Gulfstream” are named after the warm water current of the Atlantic and seem like nature pieces, enchanting flower fields or tropical gardens. The related works “Psychotropical” represent maybe a closer look on vegetation such as a small group of plants or a bouquet of flowers. They express the crazy, the excessive, the uncontrolled and the inconceivable during the flush after having taken hallucinogenic drugs. In the group “Atlas” the plants are more or less regularly distributed on the canvas like a part of an endless pattern or a proliferating network of plants. The “Supernatural” are probably close-ups of particular blossoms and the representation of an artificial world. “Levante” are like portraits of isolated flowers with an mysterious light around its head. The “Technicolor” series are strip paintings with various horizontal color bands what create the impression of a passing landscape like a color movie with a fictive ride through a landscape. They even may tell a little unspectacular but unclear and incomprehensible story. 

Finally, the “Andromeda“ images with mainly a black background and small white or colored dots can probably be construed as the view upward to the night sky with its stars and planets and are one of the latest inventions by the artist. 

Devine Illusion

To create these brilliant and shining paintings, Thierry Feuz has developed his own practice, style and technique. He works with wet on wet acrylic paint and lacquer what means that he puts fluid paint on a liquid ground coat. The canvas has to be located horizontally on a table while he puts the monochrome key lacquer. Therefore, he mostly applies a white, more rarely a black or another very strong base color. Immediately, and before the paint starts to dry, he needs to add the other colors onto the wet ground coat and starts to draw and paint with brushes, little sticks, hair combs, scrapers, knifes, sprays and air brushes as well as other instruments and tools. The great challenge is to keep the smooth homogeneity of the surface and to bring together to an entity the controllable with the uncontrollable of the extremely fluid paints.

He has to work very carefully and precisely because there is no possibility of correction. What once has been painted is meant to stay forever. His challenging goal is to reach perfection in design and color combinations with minimal interventions. Like a conductor wants to manage the momentum of the musicians and to evoke the complete sound, Thierry Feuz wants to give the right amount of the paint with the accurate movement to the perfect position while the amalgamation of the colors has its own dynamic and rules. They mix themselves a little by natural and uncontrollable diffusion. The result leads to color resonance and vibrancy, rhythm, and harmonic tonalities. Additionally, he also has to be in a special mood to do his artistic work, in a kind of mental flow. 

Evolution and Revolution 

Today, Thierry Feuz definitely is a multicultural world traveler in the matter of art with a very long and impressive curriculum while he still holds his base in the little cosmopolitan city of Geneva. Already during university he started to participate in various exhibitions, received grants and awards and was published in publications. Originally, he was born in 1968 in baroque and glamorous Vienna, Austria, where he grew up and went to school. After his academic studies in art history and history in the cozy city of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, he became student of the Department of Fine Arts at the Geneva University of Art and Design. He specialized in painting, spent an exchange year at the University of Arts in vibrant and dynamic metropolis Berlin and finished his art education finally with a Master of Arts. 

Dissolution

At first glance at the joyous paintings by Thierry Feuz the topic is nature, especially flowers and landscapes, even the works are oscillating between figuration, ornament and abstraction. From single blossoms to entire bouquet of flowers, from floating parts of plants to crawling microorganisms, from firmament to linear landscapes, you find all different kinds of illustrations and allusions in the canvases or drawings. But the attentive observer not only sees the bright, shining and joyful play with colors and forms or layers and tomes but also senses the deep and evocative meanings. What seems to be a contradiction between intellect and superficial beauty, in reality is not. Thierry Feuz unifies classical, medieval, baroque, impressionistic, surrealistic and abstract-expressionistic elements with post-modern spirit-of-the-time philosophy and topical cognition.

Flowers of Evil 

The historic origin of Thierry Feuz’ flower and landscape pictures can be found in the Latin wall paintings with idealistic gardens and parks or in the architectural element of the arabesque, the decorative flower cirrus. Later follow around 1410 the religious medieval garden of paradise by an unknown master and the spiritual and meaningful baroque Bodegones still lifes by Juan Sánchez-Cotán or Juan van der Hamen y Leon. The impressionist painters like Claude Monet with the water-lilies and Vincent van Gogh with the sunflowers tried to express emotions through flowers. Also the surrealistic landscapes by Max Ernst evoke similarity. The most analogies exist with the abstract expressionists. They contend the energy of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings and drippings or Sam Francis’ clouds, the contemplation of Marc Rothko’s color fields or Ellsworth Kelly’s structural monochromes, as well as the allusion of Cy Twombly’s history paintings or Willem de Kooning’s abstract landscapes. However, when Thierry Feuz paints something comparable to flowers and gardens, then he includes all these topics. 

Both seductive and repulsive at the same time are the paintings by Thierry Feuz. “By making art I can live more sensitively but it also costs me a lot of energy”, Thierry Feuz confesses by speaking about his life and work. The ambivalence in the painting is obvious and pervasive for the sensitive observer as in the splendid and poetic images are the existential themes such as beauty, love and death, the decomposition of life and nature, the dramatic process of creation, propagation and decay coherent. Like baroque paintings are expressing triumphant power through dynamic composition and ambiguity, Thierry Feuz is fathoming and sharpening the scope of perception and cognition of the beholder, is breaking boundaries and is creating significance for deep emotions and sensations as well as secret and hidden meanings. With emotive dynamism, intensity and immediacy he tries to communicate something in a subtle way because art should move the observer without being completely clear since art cannot give definite answers but only evoke disturbance.