Exhibitions
DORF
Galerie du Crous de Paris, FR
2025
Press Release2025
THE EXHIBITION IS BUILT FOR THESE
It is solid, it is scale and weight and also cuisine and taste and sound, to be somewhere, and even more if that is in a town within a town, maybe.
Pointers in the entourages we inhabit are localising and anchoring, they become architecture. I imagine the way the eye of a local experiences the environment, and wonder if it works like in digital rendering, where only the thing that moves is rendered anew— or was that how the eye works? That parts are left out, out of habit, for simplicity, was that it?
I think of the way sculpted marzipan sweets in a vitrine help denote time, seasons and traditions, right next to a grey pavement. Of powder-coated miniature hillsides, pink pigs, yellow easter eggs. Of things freezing, melting, holding, sounding differently in exactly the same place depending on the moment. Of things and people and architecture and food, giving off on each other, leaving an imprint. Of chewing while looking out the window, and the mastication, really, of what is around.
I think of these little men being the logo of the artist’s grandfather’s Confiserie Castrischer
founded in 1964. Of the familiarity that one has with the drawn little figure that inhabits the
breakfast table every Sunday, while you feed the passing of time, spelled in sugar. I also imagine Nicole Wermers’s book «Croissants and Architecture» on the modernist coffee table.
Every time I’m in the countryside side, I remark how I somehow ended up there again, always through others, and I smile at how silent the light falls there. And just equally silently shifts through the architecture, and people open windows and close them again, regulating temperatures and sounds and desires.
I think of floating and foundations. Imagine columns that don’t touch the ceiling. You’ll see them in the analogue photographs Clément took in Flims Dorf, Switzerland, where Rudolf Olgiati built this town in a town, called Olgiati District. The large wooden constructions around you, now in this exhibition, are in fact moulds for approximate replicas of the famous Olgiati’s pillars. His student, Peter Märkli, mentions how pillars can be freed of their structural load-bearing function to serve merely a composition, the rhythm of your step as you walk by. And imagine windows placed to serve composition, be it on the architectural plan of Oligiati or in the passe partout of Clément. Like a painting, a house is composed.
I also think of how the flat bottles are fly traps made out of glass, like a Sprite bottle, but forever. It reminds me of the sun, wasps, and Walibi. Yet these are failed traps, they won’t catch any flies, just as the patisserie for these little figures will never be delivered, and the chocolate will never melt. The drawing of keys you see here, Clément bought from a former exhibition, and he added to the existing image. The depicted keys become latent potential tools, opening these houses, maybe.
I remember being on my knees by the stone coffee table, with a square spoon in hand, and
there, I remember waking up from having fallen asleep in my chocolate mousse. Through the glass dessert plate, I see the large photo downstairs, the house of Clément’s grandfather before the renovation. The print emulsifies that house, Rudolf Oligiati and houses in the town, with the grandfather and thus the chocolaterie.
Céline Mathieu.
It is solid, it is scale and weight and also cuisine and taste and sound, to be somewhere, and even more if that is in a town within a town, maybe.
Pointers in the entourages we inhabit are localising and anchoring, they become architecture. I imagine the way the eye of a local experiences the environment, and wonder if it works like in digital rendering, where only the thing that moves is rendered anew— or was that how the eye works? That parts are left out, out of habit, for simplicity, was that it?
I think of the way sculpted marzipan sweets in a vitrine help denote time, seasons and traditions, right next to a grey pavement. Of powder-coated miniature hillsides, pink pigs, yellow easter eggs. Of things freezing, melting, holding, sounding differently in exactly the same place depending on the moment. Of things and people and architecture and food, giving off on each other, leaving an imprint. Of chewing while looking out the window, and the mastication, really, of what is around.
I think of these little men being the logo of the artist’s grandfather’s Confiserie Castrischer
founded in 1964. Of the familiarity that one has with the drawn little figure that inhabits the
breakfast table every Sunday, while you feed the passing of time, spelled in sugar. I also imagine Nicole Wermers’s book «Croissants and Architecture» on the modernist coffee table.
Every time I’m in the countryside side, I remark how I somehow ended up there again, always through others, and I smile at how silent the light falls there. And just equally silently shifts through the architecture, and people open windows and close them again, regulating temperatures and sounds and desires.
I think of floating and foundations. Imagine columns that don’t touch the ceiling. You’ll see them in the analogue photographs Clément took in Flims Dorf, Switzerland, where Rudolf Olgiati built this town in a town, called Olgiati District. The large wooden constructions around you, now in this exhibition, are in fact moulds for approximate replicas of the famous Olgiati’s pillars. His student, Peter Märkli, mentions how pillars can be freed of their structural load-bearing function to serve merely a composition, the rhythm of your step as you walk by. And imagine windows placed to serve composition, be it on the architectural plan of Oligiati or in the passe partout of Clément. Like a painting, a house is composed.
I also think of how the flat bottles are fly traps made out of glass, like a Sprite bottle, but forever. It reminds me of the sun, wasps, and Walibi. Yet these are failed traps, they won’t catch any flies, just as the patisserie for these little figures will never be delivered, and the chocolate will never melt. The drawing of keys you see here, Clément bought from a former exhibition, and he added to the existing image. The depicted keys become latent potential tools, opening these houses, maybe.
I remember being on my knees by the stone coffee table, with a square spoon in hand, and
there, I remember waking up from having fallen asleep in my chocolate mousse. Through the glass dessert plate, I see the large photo downstairs, the house of Clément’s grandfather before the renovation. The print emulsifies that house, Rudolf Oligiati and houses in the town, with the grandfather and thus the chocolaterie.
Céline Mathieu.
