Cassina Projects is pleased to present By Your Side, the second exhibition by Swiss artist Yves Scherer (*1987) with the gallery. Incorporating paintings, lenticular prints and sculptures, By Your Side follows on Scherer’s first institutional solo show in Switzerland on display at Kunsthaus Grenchen.
Yves Scherer’s multifarious language explores the notion of identity, tiptoeing across the porous line between fiction and real life and defying the binaries of individual and collective, private and public. Piecing together diverse bodies of work from the artist recent output, By Your Side builds upon the dissolution of boundaries and constructs a radical, fragmented narrative collage where the voyeuristic and the autobiographical intertwine.
As the artist delves into the celebrity world as vessel of collective identity, Untitled (Autumn) a new lenticular work emblematically depicting Vincent Cassel and Tina Kunakey echoes the title of the show taken from the famous romantic song by the English band Sade. The overlap of Cassel’s and Kunakey’s profiles hints at the colliding representations of the individual and the public-morphed persona, their relationship providing an idealised version of love and success which the viewer in the society of spectacle can only contemplate and aspire to emulate.
Two sculptural works further emphasize Scherer’s interest on gender-based social structures being reformed by shifting paradigms of identity. A hyper-realistic painted aluminium sculpture of a young girl (Sitting Girl, 2020 ) in a tranquil, unruffled pose sits low on the ground, facing the viewer directly, while a plaster figure of a little boy attached to a tree chunk (Boy with tree, 2020) looks up at the sky revealing an expression of awe and enchantment. Pure in its white nakedness, the artist’s self portrait imbues the scene with a candid, innocent aura.
Five new large-scale paintings evoke a serene, bucolic outdoor environment, the artist’s locus amoenus where childhood memories, life and longing coalesce. Worked upon in a studio nearby the lake of Geneve during Scherer’s recent stay in his native Switzerland, these canvasses distil a contemplative feel. If the bright hues and the use of materials like wax and spray paint indicate the persisting influence of American post war and contemporary painting, the idyllic representation of familiar landscapes, as childlike naïve depictions of flowers (Untitled (Spring)) and as studies on colour and composition (Untitled (Apple Tree)), conveys a sense of intimacy and nostalgic pull which delicately lingers over the show.
Unveiling the artist’s universe, By Your Side is a joyful testimony to romantic ideals as Scherer braids together his life, their life and our life.
Yves Scherer (*1987, Solothurn, Switzerland) lives and works in NY. He holds an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art London. His work has been presented at international institutions such as ICA London, Kunsthalle Basel, Swiss Institute NY, Kunstverein Wiesen, Kunsthaus Grenchen and Basement Roma. He has had solo shows at Guido Baudach, Berlin (2019, 2016, 2014); Cassina Projects, NY (2018); Golsa Gallery, Oslo (2020, 2018); José Garcia, Mexico City (2015) amongst others. He received the Swiss Art Award (2015).
