Cassina Projects is pleased to present Primal - its first solo exhibition on the most recent work by New York based Swiss artist, Yves Scherer (b. 1987, Solothurn, Switzerland).
Engaging with celebrity culture, online media, and spectacle, Scherer has been particularly recognized for portraying personal experiences in the context of today's globalized society of digitally accessible information. Breaching the gap between the intimate and public, the artist questions our perception of reality through a virtual world of instantly recognizable faces. Scherer's interest in interiority now reaches an even further extent, but rather than bringing the private into the public, his present exhibition ventures into the innate and primal qualities of emotions springing from threaded moments of his life.
Using a photograph taken during the artist's childhood by his father, the show is introduced through the intimate love and affective gesture of a mother who closely holds and protects her offspring. Stemming from the idea that sentiment and memory transcend and unfold within a deeper layer of meaning, Scherer transports the viewer to a universal reality beyond recognizable time.
Sculptures have been reduced to raw and coarse materials that attempt to capture and exude irrepressible and natural states of feeling. Ranging from more suggestive to figurative forms, the works are characterized for their unfinished and unprocessed appearance. Strips of faux-fur drape from chunks of wood and cut branches that have in turn been attached to used boards, simple bases, and canvases lathered in natural hues of paint - splashed without any allusion to apparent form or pattern. Subsequently, segments of coarse tree trunks stand tall with carved orifices piercing through them. The mixed media sculptures and wall works are unified by their analogous visual language and playful combination of primary colors.
In Primal, eternal motifs and experiences essential to human condition such as sexuality, personal recollections, and love, unveil as a collage of color and material. In contrast to his previous perspective of life through idealized social constructions of stardom, Scherer now deconstructs the most inherent expressions of himself.
