Valentin Rilliet: Look at You: Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Zahnradstrasse, 21, Zurich

In The End (Yawny), three sleeping figures lie within a nocturnal landscape, their bodies wrapped in sharply folded textiles whose angular creases create a striking sense of movement even in stillness. Around them, clusters of bioluminescent mushrooms cast a pale glow across their faces and bodies. One figure appears to be gently pulled upwards, echoed by the mushrooms that seem to rise towards the sky, introducing the suggestion of an out-of-body experience or passage between different states of consciousness.

Rilliet builds the night through subtle variations of black, blue and violet, punctuated by luminous greens and cool highlights. A large, almost empty expanse separates the figures from the distant horizon and fireflies above. Rather than filling this space, the painting leaves it open, creating a sense of suspension and allowing the viewer to imagine what might exist within the darkness.

In Homes (What Went Wrong in Paradise?), Rilliet adopts an elevated, almost aerial perspective inspired in part by Chinese painting traditions, where landscapes and cities can unfold from a viewpoint hovering between earth and sky. The city is constructed almost like a map: architecture, figures and events are distributed across the surface, inviting the eye to wander from one scene to another.
The architecture is deliberately hybrid, combining Asian, European and medieval references without belonging to one specific place. Small figures populate the streets; some are solid, others translucent or ghostlike, partially dissolving into the mist. What first appears to be an invasion or apocalyptic event is interrupted by moments of ordinary activity, play and humour.
The title introduces a tension between the idea of home as a place of shelter and the sense that something in this bright, imagined paradise has gone slightly wrong. At the same time, the city can be read almost like a map of Rilliet’s wider pictorial world: a theatre, a memory, or the possible setting of another painting might be hidden somewhere within it. Like a video-game environment, it invites the viewer to move through different zones, making connections and constructing their own path through the image.

Wicked Games is structured as a large-scale composition of interconnected scenes, drawing on the compartmentalized formats of Japanese prints and comic books. Each action triggers another, creating a continuous chain of cause and effect in which energy is passed from one element to the next. The dragon breathes fire, the fire expands and turns into smoke, the smoke leads the eye toward the armed figure, and the movement continues from one pictorial field to another. Different forces — attack, danger, reaction and protection — seem to set one another in motion, while the exact logic of the sequence remains deliberately unresolved.
Despite the presence of fire, weapons and mythical creatures, the painting remains playful rather than overtly violent. Exaggerated gestures, abrupt shifts in scale and vivid blocks of orange, green, blue and yellow introduce humour and give the work an almost graphic, printed quality. Different cultural references — from a Chinese interpretation of a Western dragon to a figure wearing a uniform associated with Cultural Revolution-era China — are brought together within this deliberately unstable chain of images.