Alexandre Bianchini, Detroit on Circle, digital transfer of Super 8 films, 12’24’’, music, 1996
Immersed in an environment that favours abstract painting, influenced by the Swiss tradition, concrete art and the 1960s myth of American abstraction, Alexandre Bianchini sought out other influences within the conceptual movement of the 1960s and 70s, with Andy Warhol and pop art. With the same desire to identify more immediate and more critical gestures, he has revisited lighter, more mobile and even obsolete mediums, such as Super 8 film, artists’ books and print-outs.
For the screening program, Videos: new and revisited, the new CEC website and its “Recent videos” and “Archives” components, we have chosen the edition of a series of Super 8 films by Alexandre Bianchini, Detroit on Circle, dating from 1996, from the CEC collection. Each of these short, 3-minute films features a soundtrack of techno music excerpts, direct references to artists from the Detroit music scene, with Robert Hood and Jeff Mills, or to the artist’s immediate environment and the techno scene, with DJ Sid and Hubert Mean.
Panning in and out to the rhythm of the sound excerpts, Bianchini films a piece of cardboard taken from a box of “crispy sesame bread” by the Swiss brand Roland, which is fixed vertically in the centre of a vinyl record playing at 33 rpm. This little carousel alternately presents this advert for sesame bread and the image glued to the back of the cardboard, sometimes of a Spartan room, sometimes of a jungle path, a souvenir of the artist’s visit to Colombia. The video of this endless carousel, caught in a back-and-forth movement, with its very rhythmic, repetitive and catchy techno sounds, provokes a hypnotic and old-fashioned effect, making spectators oscillate between these Swiss crackers and the sensations of a trip to Colombia.
Alexandre Bianchini (1966, Geneva) lives and works in Geneva. His work has been presented in various solo exhibitions, such as Child of Rage at Locus solus, Prilly (2022); Sans tain sans titre au Halle nord, Geneva (2018). He has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions: Acquisitions 2021 at the Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève, Geneva (2022); Etat des lieux at the Maison Gaudard, Lausanne (2022).
This project is sponsored by the Federal Office of Culture and the Republic and the Canton of Geneva.
This video is a recording of a performance by Roman Signer, filmed behind closed doors directly in the Centre’s exhibition room (in 1990, Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine) prior to his solo exhibition, which ran from October 26th to December 8th, 1990. He presented the various elements used for this performance: a helicopter with a brush, a tin can filled with black ink and nine paintings.
For this action, a model helicopter was fitted with a paintbrush at its base. The helicopter had to fly back and forth between a can filled with black paint, placed in the centre of a set of nine blank canvases on the ground. With each rotation, the helicopter, guided by an expert model pilot, dipped its brush into the tin can and deposited black paint on each of the canvases, producing a series of informal paintings.
“Roman Signer works with the natural elements – water, fire, air, earth – and sometimes with manufactured or industrialised objects such as crates, drums, balloons or furniture, making them fly, fall, explode, fill up, empty, etc., like Richard Serra when he proposed his famous list of action verbs “to lift, to curl, to roll, to bend, to tie, to curve, to inlay, to splash…” in 1967-1968. Roman Signer favours the unfolding, the process and the idea of sculpture in motion. His latest film retraces an action that lasted over a month, Aktion mit einer Zündschnur, between Appenzell and St Gallen. A 20km-long wick was placed along the railway line linking the two towns. The fuse was set off at Appenzell station, and ended at St. Gallen station. Roman Signer and his team had to monitor the flame’s path and detonate it every 100 metres. So there were 200 explosions, every 4 and a half hours, with the flame travelling at a speed of a metre per quarter of an hour. Far from being a minor calculation problem, this action confronted the violence of each explosion, the derisory repetition of the same brief incident with the stretching of the total time (35 days). It took the form of an initiatory journey in which a balance between the concentration of energy and its release had to be maintained. Roman Signer seeks a certain domination of space and time that requires attention and psychic dispositions for each action, expressed through games that are often violent and dangerous, but always poetic, magical and humorous. So Roman Signer is not just a kind of genius pyrotechnician, but an artist who is interested in situations of tension, in order to create movements and aesthetic forms that exploit the various physical capacities of each chosen “object”. The event can be remarkably simple, as in the case of Boîte aux feuilles mortes (1982), which is placed under trees and fills up with leaves as the autumn season progresses.”
(Extract from the press release for Roman Signer’s solo exhibition, Installation hélicoptère, 1990, which ran from 26.10 to 8.12.1990)
Roman Signer, Installation hélicoptère, 1990, video, PAL, 5′, colour, sound, model helicopter pilot: Armin Caspari, images: Simon Lamunière, 10 U-Matic copies numbered 1 to 10 and 5 H.C. copies numbered I to V and signed, 20 VHS copies numbered 1 to 20 and 4 H.C. copies numbered I to IV and signed. Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine/CEC, 1990
Roman Signer was born in Appenzell in 1938. He lives and works in St. Gallen. Amongst his many solo exhibitions, his most recent include: Kunsteinrichtung Roman Signer, Villa Garbald, Castagne (2023); Roman Signer. Schenkung der Ursula Hauser Sammlung, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2023); Roman Signer, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2023); Roman Signer. Installation, Stampa, Basel (2022), Roman Signer. Sculptures and an installation, Art: Concept, Paris (2022); Roman Signer, FRAC Franche-Comté (2022); Roman Signer. Vier Apfel / Four Apples 2011-2021, The Little Art Window, Gstaad (2021). His work has also been included in group exhibitions includeing: Schildkrötentempel. Kleine Skulpturen und Objekte, Rehmann Museum, Laufenburg (2023); Gruppenausstellung, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton (2023); On Kawara. Eine Hommage an On Kawara und Hiroko Kawahara, Kunstzone Lokremise, St. Gallen (2022); Show Your Work, 601Artspace, New York (2022); Moment.Monument, Kunst Museum Winterthur, Winterthur (2021); The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021).
This project is sponsored by the Federal Office of Culture and the Republic and the Canton of Geneva.
