Marc-Antoine Fehr

Overview

With his classical, figurative painting, Marc-Antoine Fehr is a singular phenomenon in the Swiss art landscape, a loner who has, however, always attracted attention at his regular, if not frequent, appearances. He last exhibited in Zurich at Thomas Ammann Fine Art in 2006, and in 2003 his Journal de Pressy was on view at the ETH Graphische Sammlung.

Following on from these two exhibitions, Fehr is showing two focal points of his most recent work at the Helmhaus Zurich: in addition to mostly large-format oil paintings with a still-life character, Paysage sans fin, composed of hundreds of gouaches in the format of 7.5 x 102 cm to form a strip totaling over 500 meters. This "endless" landscape, which Fehr has been working on since 1999 and which is one of his unfinished - and unfinishable - projects, is being presented for the first time at the Helmhaus in Zurich, in its own room on an almost closed oval, where it extends over fourteen floors from floor to ceiling and gives the impression of a spiral. Like the diary pages collected in the Journal de Pressy, it is sketchy and touches on all the themes that preoccupied him. If this landscape strip describes the flow of time in an intuitive sequence of scenes beyond his own subjective mechanism of perception, his parallel oil paintings are characterized precisely by the fact that they have brought time to a standstill, frozen it seems. In his most recent phase of work, Marc-Antoine Fehr has moved even closer to the representational, which has always been the starting point for his compositions, even the most fantastic ones. Not for the purpose of the most naturalistic rendering possible, but rather in interrogation of a reality that hints at so much and conceals so much. Artifacts from the world of games are now the focus of his interest. The objects he paints are marked by signs of use and tell not only of longings but also of painful losses. By virtue of his sensual painting and by means of alienation, which also includes monumentalization, he also honors their anonymous creators in the humble objects