FABRICE GYGI

For his first one-person exhibition in the U.S., Fabrice Gygi, a European
shooting star, has transformed the Swiss Institute’s gallery space into a
polling station. Fabrice Gygi presents his work the way that a dealer of
illegal goods displays his objects on the street. He uses a mobile structure
that can vanish in the wink of an eye and reappear just as quickly
elsewhere - not seen, not captured, but always there. A structure too
heavy, too static, and he is dead, he disappears. As in his first exhibitions,
Fabrice Gygi still works with canvas tarpaulins, fitted pipes, inflatable
modules, and wire mesh. He utilizes, for example: protective mattresses,
which he attaches around columns or along handrails ; tents for covering
a tribunal ; sand bags placed at the entrance to a museum ; fences made
of tarpaulins that form a barrier. Besides the elaboration of a remarkably
coherent plastic language, the great force of Fabrice Gygi’s work resides
in an ambiguity never quite resolved in his proposals. Is a podium made
of grey-green canvas and wood designed for the use of wealthy generals,
who have at their disposal a little sentry box hastily constructed for viewing
a march of troops in the Valais Alps ? Or is it perhaps a mobile space for
surveillance, where those same generals, taken prisoner by guerrillas,
are being "exhibited" before entering the tent-tribunal ? But who decides :
a representative of authority or of the resistance ? Is this before or after
the coup d’état ? 
The work shown at SI: a kit for voting with booth, ballot box, crowd barriers,
benches, notice boards, flagpole, etc., shares the same ambiguity. For
whom are we going to vote? Is there really a choice? Is it just an installation
to please the media, as the die is already cast. Or is this kit a standard
model of what should be a fair voting? Anyway, it's hard to decide. This
state of indecisiveness makes such a work not pleasant at all, not
friendly-user or relation oriented. Fabrice Gygi doesn't care. Attempts
have been made to define art by its capacity to generate exchange, to
“inhabit” the everyday, to forge links between different segments of reality.
Certainly, much of today’s art tastes “real” but, just as Canada Dry is not
whiskey, so art is not reality. Or rather art, which is always furtive, constitutes
a parallel reality. Artists like Gygi are not obsessed with organizing
neighborly, even fruitful relations between these two realities. Never there
where you expect them, they are constantly developing transfer movements,
activating energy vectors and the constant oscillations that undermine our
systems of interpretation. (Marc-Olivier Wahler)

Co-production: Fonds cantonal de décoration et d’art visuel, Geneva