Yin Yang

For their fourth solo exhibtion at the gallery, Swiss duo Linus Bill + Adrien Horni (both born Switzerland 1982) present a suite of recent mixed media works from the Midlife Paintings series.

Continuing the artist’s long and profound investigation into the the value of the original and reproduction, each painting will be shown alongside their own copy, this time printed at 1:1 scale and spectrally inverted on the colour wheel.

In painting, a copy is more or less an exact imitation of another painting called “the original”.

By definition, both an original and a copy are undistinguishable on the level of syntax. Semantically, they could be very different. For example: Is a copy of an abstract painting, an abstract painting? In the copy we still see the original, thus it should be an abstract painting; on the other hand, being a faithful reproduction of another painting (object), it should be also a realistic painting.

This ambiguity shows how a simple copy of an abstract painting could transform something “known” into something “unknown”, turning the entire modernistic paradigm upside-down, and revealing that our idyllic backyard could be a minefield, too.

– Walter Benjamin, Recent Writings, 2013