Peter Wüthrich

CGAC, Santiago de Compostela
Through July 14

In his latest exhibition, Swiss artist Peter Wüthrich proposes a somewhat perverse turn on Conceptual art. If the artists of the late ’60s and early ’70s from this school championed the use of words and text in art, Swiss artist Wüthrich goes all the way by using the book as his primary material. The result is a highly aesthetic, highly material set of works that engages the complex intellectual framework of contemporary art since the era of Conceptualism.

Two pieces most eloquently do the trick. Literarisches Model (Literary Model) (2001) is a huge fortress-like piece made of hundreds of piled books that occupies an entire room, while Literarischer Himmel und Seinen Planeten (Literary Sky and its Planets) (2001) is an installation that recreates a solar system, made of crunched pages from canonical books, which hangs from the ceiling over a sea of blue hardcover volumes.

In two other impressive works, Wüthrich presents various series of photographs in which books are made to fly like strange birds, making abstract compositions that casually inhabit a street. The size, color, and texture of their covers serve as the chromatic and geometric palette from which the artist creates metaphors and associations that go well beyond the titles of the books he uses.

There are two other pieces that are not made out of books but do nevertheless tie up the sense of the exhibition as a whole. The first, Lesende (Readers, 1996-97) is a series of very small, seemingly found pictures of people absorbed in the act of reading, each one of them centred inside a circular frame, in a world of their own. As small as they are, the works capture the viewer’s attention but lead only to disappointment as the subjects are psychologically inaccessible, having disappeared into the stories of their books.

Die Kunst des Schauens (The Art of Looking) (2001) consists of a big net made out of the same white silk ribbons that are often used as bookmarks. The piece deals physically and metaphorically with the idea of suspension, with the time that one needs to go in and out of worlds in the act of reading. With these works the artist intends to bring down the wall between beauty and brain, a task at which he succeeds.




Issa Ma. Benítez Dueñas