Rémy Zaugg. My neighbour Death and perception
The Zentrum Paul Klee is to mount a temporary exhibition in commemoration of Rémy Zaugg, who died shortly after completing his commissioned work.
Michèle Zaugg-Röthlisberger, Curator
At the Zentrum Paul Klee, one of Rémy Zaugg’s last works has been shown in the exhibition space devoted to Paul Klee: it was a response to Klee’s famous pronouncement, made in his 1920 essay «The Creative Confession» – «Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible» – a groundbreaking artistic declaration to the effect that far from copying reality, art invents it.
In the sequence devoted to Paul Klee, Zaugg explores the eclipsing of the visible by having the white-coloured text meld with the background. Disappearance is a theme that iterates in a number of Zaugg’s works.Resonating with the eclipsing of the visible, and occupying a central nexus in Zaugg’s oeuvre, is the eclipsing of life itself, i.e. death. For the artist, death occurs at the limits of perception and is resistant to further analysis. While blindness is the death of sight, death is the end of any kind of perception.
The core of the exhibition is composed of the group Vom Tod II [From Death II]. It consists of 27 panels treating the theme of life and death. The words UND WENN, DER TOD and ICH WÄRE [and if / death / I would be] are picked out in colour against a garish background; they stand alone or are accompanied by words that denote various parts of the body. These panels are amplified by arrangements of Latin or German nomenclatures of plants, trees, mosses, cereals, flowers, bracken, lichens or ferns. The effect is one long sequence of lurid colourations.
The mix of text and fluorescent backgrounds is an assault on the retina. It over-stimulates the eye. You get a real sense of how the dissolution of visual perception (which is inextricably bound with our physical demise) might feel. Death in all its kitschy garishness follows – yet remains beyond our grasp.
