Tobias Spichtig: Heavy Mental: Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich

The figures in Spichtig’s paintings appear drained, floating, spectral—somewhere between ghosts and idols. They carry the echo of music posters, burned-out social feeds, and teenage bedroom walls when everything felt both insane, deeply meaningful, mad and fun. His portraits don’t perform identity; they haunt it. The new works do not so much represent feelings as they emit them, steeped in the residue of moods we recognize but cannot easily name. They are less about narrative or interpretation than they are about the texture of a moment, a state of mind, a sound still reverberating long after it ends.

 

This paradox—of feeling both too much and not enough—resonates in the paintings. The figures in Heavy Mental are both radically present and overwhelmingly charged. Their blank stares and emptied eyes do not nullify affect, but intensify it, the viewer becomes a screen onto which emotion is projected—melancholy, yearning, alienation, recognition.

 

Spichtig’s practice is grounded in a persistent negotiation with presence, absence, and the conditions of perception. While his paintings are resolutely figurative, his portraits are as much intimate likenesses as idols—figures rendered with the stylized detachment of a magazine cover or bedroom poster, gesturing toward a collective escaping of feelings, fragmentation, and dislocation but pointing towards something to long for. In their hollowed gazes and affectless stillness, one senses a generation caught between visibility and dissolution, between the illusion of knowing and the reality of never quite arriving at meaning. What connects these figures is the gaze that shapes them, one that remains unchanged whether painting those closest to him—friends, collaborators—or long-admired cultural figures. Spichtig’s gaze remains constant: a fan’s awe, pure and unrelenting. In this Warholian perspective everyone is both person and myth. The artist’s admiration is not diminished by proximity—if anything, it deepens, becoming less about fantasy and more about shared history, presence and feelings.

For his sculptures, Spichtig usually uses second-hand clothing, often from friends, which he immerses in resin and occasionally coats with nickel, or other metals. For the first time with Galerie Peter Kilchmann he produced his signature silhouettes in bronze, finished with a subtle greenish patina, by casting an original resin sculpture and burning it out. The result is a spindly, cloaked and elongated figure that stands in an up-straight-manner on a pair of swimming flippers, originally intended for diving. The very fabric details of the clothing items is distinctly visible in the bronze cast, leaving richly textured marks on the work and resembling the fabrication traces of sculptures of artists like Hans Josephson. The unusual pairing comes from a coincidence to try and stabilize the fragile and thinned out sculptures with elements found in his studio. Its draped, hooded form is frozen in folds—evoking both the ephemeral quality of a garment and its texture in motion and the stiffness of a wax figure or mannequin. These figure appear post-human, puppet-like, evoking an eerie stillness. Supported by the simple pose, the one of a random bystander, spectator or visitor, the form remains anonymous and void-like—typical of Spichtig’s figures that serve more as symbols of presence than actual individual. 

 

If there’s a joke here, it’s surely not at the viewer’s expense. It’s about the absurdity and beauty of daily life. But also: the joke is sacred. Because it’s not just a joke. Heavy metal, teenage fantasy, crisis disguised as cool— and all great madness still works. Half a life later, the same sounds still sound great. The same images remain just as resonant. Spichtig’s paintings offer that same kind of unplaceable power: simultaneously out-of-time yet absolutely contemporary.