Félix / Riverside Moonwalk
21/02/2024 - 25/02/2024
Visarte Zurich
Schoffelgasse 10
8001 Zurich
Exhibition text:
The river's flow carries with it materials, temporalities and stories - raindrops from the past, branches from a distant forest, fish thoughts and grains of sand that move like red blood cells do in our bodies. It's always in moments of emotional intensity that I feel the need to follow a river on foot. Close to water, one feels alive and by the meandering banks, time passes more slowly. In its moving flow, water is a vessel that transports, transforms, reinforces and dilutes emotions. I'm thinking of Mina's “fiume azzurro”, the “cry me a river”, Patti Smith's "pissing in a river”.
Although water has never been found on the moon, we continue to believe in its presence, searching for it in the rocks. Here too, in Riverside Moonwalk the river is invisible, but not what the water carries, nor its movement: these are found in the pieces described by Félix as "performing sculptures".
We're invited to wander through a landscape of frozen sculptures that yet evoke a flow, both conceptually and in their very materiality. Without even touching them, you can tell that these pieces are cold, like river water. They are not made of ice, nor of wax. They are assemblages of glass, a material that is itself an assemblage of an almost infinite number of grains of sand. This glass is meticulously collected by the artist in a multiplicity of places and contexts. The different types of glass are then assembled in molds and fused together. The result is a transfer of materials, shapes and contents. The chemical reactions create a palette of colors. Different shades of blue decided to morph beyond the artist's control.
Here, glass is no longer a transparent surface through which one observes something else; it becomes the subject and, like a vessel of emotions, contains a multitude of stories. In the molecular sense, the vitreous state is a particular state of matter, neither solid nor liquid, an in-between. Looking at the drops on the surface of Félix's pieces, one thinks that by the next hot summer, they'll be liquid again, and the flow will carry on.
The sculptures have the particular opacity of ghostly beings, a non-present presence, a stasis that contains within it the possibility of transformation. When we think of sculpture in the traditional, historical sense, we imagine muscular bodies fixed forever in stone, the engraving of an unchanging truth, a momentum halted forever. Here, we are reminded that with the passage of time, even the most solid stone will change shape. In the exhibition space, we might recognize branches. They're the same bits of wood swept along by the current, polished by the water. When time slows down, the branches come together at the meander’s edge to form temporary piles.
Lying on the ground, as if levitating, the lunar forms seem to come from another ecosystem: time is stretched out, there may be no oxygen in the air. In this exhibition, we follow the flow of the river in a moonwalk - one foot after the other, sliding backwards, always in motion. The sculptures perform, their color and transparency changing with the light, and we follow the water's course in reverse as if we were going to find back everything that had been transported. In this distorted, extended temporality, we imagine windows melting and bunkers eroding.
- Monica Unser