W139

Sublime Eroding

21 Nov - 20 Dec 2015

Photo by Chun-Han Chiang
SUBLIME ERODING
Christoph Bartsch, Julien Dutertre, Sébastien Montéro, Michael Petri, Nans Quétel, Norbert Reissig, Martin Wühler
21 November – 20 December 2015

A screen visualised in oil; a Parthian sculpture destroyed in Mosul cast in ballistic gelatine; a drone simulating human empathy. During the exhibition Sublime Eroding, the artists Christoph Bartsch (G), Julien Dutertre (B), Sébastien Montéro (F), Michael Petri (AT), Nans Quétel (F), Norbert Reissig (G) and Martin Wühler (G) examine the varying levels of the Sublime.

In a world where everything appears to be reproducible, does the Sublime through this process of reproducibility, lose its enchantment or its inclination to the unknown, its disturbing, puzzling nature, like most of its specific qualities?

The Sublime's capacity to 'surpass' leads us to believe that it is able to sustain itself and survive due to its own specific trait.

Envision having to save the world from reproducibility, the Sublime could act as its imaginary lifeguard - this lifeguard, the one from our imaginary summer beaches – the embodiment of an idealised world, where sheer immenseness and danger are quietly controlled by this man in a T-shirt, slightly over-muscular and a bit melancholic, always waiting for a rare affront.

Nothing can prove that this world is working towards its own decimation, like an erosion, when it has sustained itself since its beginning through reproductions.
This tendency to place ourselves within a collapsing world, rather than enjoying its head-spinning of a free fall, in which the T-Shirt of the lifeguard becomes a wing-suit, isn't giving the right colour to the Sublime, other than the perfume of a distinguished morbidity.
Between layered airstreams, the Sublime net; a trail of golden dust, why not until the great nanshole sucks us up: passing by rocks, touching the storm. This erosion could be merely a lack of our own understanding, its inability to catch the Sublime, its refusal to catch it, while the Sublime is able to do just that.

Let us suppose that this is a layered process, depending on the combination of these different levels. This matter of perspective is open to everyone and therefore will not allow for a decisive or final answer in the artist's works. An actual form of the Sublime could emerge and even more, through what is left of it, from its own dust.
Like a carbon 14-dating, from one time to another, a discussion lingering between epochs, one of the ultimate sublimations is the time machine powered by fiction, the very one which is continuing our day to day life.