Re-MIX

Amélie Cochet (Fantoche – International Animation Film Festival Baden) and Jan Lässig (Aargauer Kunsthaus) devised an inspiring experiment together in animating some paintings of the museum collection. A fairly old experiment indeed, insofar as movement and narrative iteration have been the explicit or implicit dream of painting: from vase painting to cubism, the static discipline of painting has not only explored the third dimension of space but also the fourth one of time. In the Aarau exhibition, for example, Otto Morach’s paintings seem to be there to remind us of this exploration. From this perspective, the focus of the exhibition is less the novelty of the idea and more the concrete experience of seeing realised what we as viewers of paintings have always imagined and fantasised, and what the paintings have always hinted at in a plethora of indirect ways. In a nutshell, the experience is definitely more intriguing than the catchy concept of the exhibition.

Only after few “watching sessions” with the iPad-prothesis can we overcome the fear of the animations that pre-empt our imagination, for we realise how the animators involved in the project have intervened in quite different modalities, each awakening or reminding us of different possibilities of doing something with the painting. For example, in selecting some formal elements and developing them, many animation films almost serve as critical reflection or tool of analysis of the painting. The most fundamental of all formal elements, the frame itself, often becomes not only a screen (as such a vertiginous shift to experience, at least the first time) but an object of reflection, such as when Sophie Laskar animates beyond the limits of the frame (of Anne Loch’s painting) or Lalita Brunner decomposes the frames of Monica Studer & Christoph van den Berg’s painting.

I personally liked when the animation ventured quite far from the painting, making it an inspiration, a starting point for a journey that gets its autonomy while still showing its origin. This is the case of Sandra Golay in her thorough aesthetic development starting with one painting by Albrecht Schnider, or of Dirk Koy’s mature filmic construction on Max Burgmeier’s painting. On this last landscape painting, Koy’s work also achieves the combining of the superposition of an ecological reflection, far from Max Burgmeier mountain idyll certainly. The insertion of exogen motives arising from our current urgencies are also apparent in Martine Ulmer’s intervention on Hans Brühlmann’s painting and Silvain Monnay’s intervention on Cuno Amiet’s painting: in pointing out the modern disappearing of the natural landscape celebrated in older Swiss art (of which the Aargauer Kunsthaus collection is the formidable representative), they both work as critique of the absurd survival of the Swiss naturalist idyll and an indirect longing for this same naturalist idyll.

Independently of which path the viewer of the exhibition will explore for her/himself, Re-MIX will provide us with the liberating experience of (being free of) searching within a painting, of playing with canons, of fantasising or, more precisely, of skilfully fantasising with art. The opposite of passive and reverent veneration, for a museum, is not just doing something with art, but doing it precisely and creatively.