René Bauermeister (1930)
Switzerland


Biography :

"René Bauermeister (04/07/1930 Neuchâtel, † 01/07/1985 Gland) spent most of his career in his canton of origin. Although he played a pioneering role in the artistic use of new techniques, this artist has been so discreet that he remains little-known and his biography incomplete.

At the beginning of the 1950s, he attended the applied art schools of Bienne and La Chaux-de-Fonds, then the Parisian workshops of André Lhote and Fernand Léger in 1953–54. At the end of his training, he obtained a certificate of aptitude for teaching drawing in Neuchâtel, where he worked in secondary schools, as well as in those of La Chaux-de-Fonds. The first exhibition that marked his career was the one presented in 1969 at the Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris. Subsequently, he exhibited, among others, at the Club 44 gallery in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1972, at the Impact Gallery in Lausanne in 1973, at the M.-L. Jeanneret international artistic experimentation center in Boissano in Italy in 1979, after being invited to stay there in 1977. In 1980, he was a laureate of the first Locarno Video Art Festival. The Jonas Gallery in Cortaillod presented his work in 1983, as did the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Sion in 1988.

His livelihood assured thanks to teaching, René Bauermeister devotes himself to the practice of the art of prospecting. Although we know little about his early painted work, much of it destroyed by his own hands it seems, there remain a few sculptures in polished wood and, above all, montages of industrial materials: chrome metal, headlights and automobile accessories in particular. The artist was also interested in certain synthetic materials such as polyester.

The work of the 1960s explores and exploits more particularly the aesthetic resources of machined metals, lighting and electronics, whether Bauermeister welds together bent elements or adjusts tubes and car headlights. , or that he uses the cathode ray screen. In the wake of this automotive inspiration, the artist also creates pseudo-road signs.

From the end of the 1960s, 16mm short film and videography represented the most important part of his work. With his friends Jean Otth, Janos Urban, Gérald Minkoff and Muriel Olesen, Bauermeister is a pioneer in the practice of art video in Switzerland. He cultivates the formula of the ellipse by combining, while playing on their contrast, very brief sequences. It takes advantage of everyday events and gestures, whose repetitive nature highlights a nagging banality: the methodical sweeping of a room, the coming and going in a public toilet, or the rapid alternation of a flag flapping and slaps regularly delivered to a face, for example.

The originality of his work is due both to his technical curiosity and to his passion for the latest generation of instrumentation. He never stops until he has discovered and implemented all the resources of the new medium, taken in isolation or using installations bringing together several monitors, juxtaposed or superimposed. Through clever devices, he “shows” the depth of the cathode ray tube itself, the paradoxical “substance” of the labile image of electronic black and white and its power of metamorphosis.

Bauermeister's work ends with a series of some twenty large format color photographs. Entitled The State of Things, it is an observation: it takes note of accumulations and series of used objects and waste, delivered in bulk, such as can be seen in certain landfills. The seduction of the image is matched only by the ecological abandonment of the things thus abandoned. Emblematic conclusion of a prematurely interrupted work, everything happens as if the artist, fascinated by advanced techniques, gave them release from a world in itself, the device dictating its law of rigor and precision, with the sharpness of a scalpel.

Jacques Monnier-Raball, 1998, updated 2018" (Source, website, SIK)

Works :
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