Artists

Gaspar Willmann

Press release

« Everyone, once in their life, write their own mystery, mine is Glass House » declares while bedridden the russian director Sergueï Eisenstein on the 17th of november 1927. Fascinated by the glass towers built in the middle of East Berlin by Mies Van der Rohe and the architects of the third international, he developed a deep passion for these structures and their symbols. The utopist outreaching of the unfinished project Eisenstein conceived keeps on resonating nowadays.

Eisenstein ghost travels through Gaspar Willmann video. What mystery is being written inside this glass box, where the transparent regime turns into an authoritarian one, to the point where it fully consumes its inhabitant? Crystalclearness, openness, deepness but also panoptics disaster. The glass metaphor is familiar with the current century in which the algorithmic logic always wins. The same one imposed upon us puts us in a universe of binarity, blank and flawless, a nod to the anti-ligature rooms where even the bonding possibilities are forbidden.

The future is über cancelled writes the ever so melancholic Mark Fisher in his various hauntology essays, the philosophy of the yet-to-come is cancelled. We are watching the disaster from the padded space of our lives, plugged on the worldwide feed. The techno-industrial time has turned into the history cycle in which humanity is quickly increasing the conditions of its own ending. Our time is covered by these stigmatas — QAnon, Hikikomori, Mukbang, Crying makeup, Doomscrolling.

Gaspar Willmann watches this frozen state happening from a never ending present, within the echo of some lost futures. But the artist also tries to escape the inevitability of this overly preached world ending. From the meeting of both Photoshop and oil painting blossoms the possibility of an island. A space that will not just be a grim and tragic jail, but rather a point of resting, meditation and contemplation. Synthetical seashores and sunsets, romantic ruins, dystopian abstractions. The gaze allows oneself some rest and can sometimes gathers with a shared expression of vulnerability. Sometimes, a hand comes to swipe away a tear, a stain, to light up a candlestick or a cigarette.

Someplace else, the meeting happens above and beyond the algorithm, its purposelessness and its monetization. There is this nameless actor, voicing a Chat GPT generated text. Or the features of this face that can be discerned behind the frozen expression of the avatar. We know that they are fragile, but they represent many ways to express what one might spend a lifetime chasing through thousands of ways. The possibility of pursuing happiness, or rather peace, despite an eroded present.

– Nastasia Hadjadji, translation Exo Exo