Month: September 2010
Crystel Ceresa
“White Noise” by the Swiss artist Crystel Ceresa (b. 1977). It is the artist’s second solo show at the gallery and the exhibition displays paintings and drawings from the artist’s studio in Geneva. At first glance, the observer is drawn and fascinated by the decorative and skillfully painted surfaces of the large-scale canvases – then by the deeper and more personal reminiscences and threads to art history.
Crystel Ceresa’s delicate aerogrammes share lightness due to the airbrush technique, the color palette of bright pastels and the partially blurred subject matter. A “white noise” occurs in the pictures – in the form of an obscuring mist, sparkling highlights, or carved inscriptions of light – which complicates a clear and evident reading and perception of the content of the works. Among the motifs are jewel-like flowers, portraits of personal heroes, fragments of text and symbolic attributes, appearing as sketches in blurred collage-like compositions. This overall expression indicates that the motives are not objective registrations of the world around us, but rather visual interpretations of the artist’s imagination, sources of inspiration and remembrance. The haze and the fragmented compositions thus maintain the content in a twilight zone as vulnerable and fragile memories that threaten to let go and disappear from the surface.
The works of Crystel Ceresa have an intimate and personal feel to them, and the persons she portrays in her art are made icons, celebrated and surrounded by symbols and represented in a visual language that has both low and fine cultural undertones. On one side the paintings evoke kitsch aesthetics, decorative and applied arts, yet gold backgrounds, skulls, whited surfaces and persons flanked by flowers, also pulls threads back into art history; to Byzantine icons, to the Baroque vanitas, the white powdered decadent images of the Rococo, and to the Pre-Raphaelites’ emblematic depictions of personal muses.
Crystel Ceresa was born in Switzerland in 1977. She graduated from Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva 2004 and from the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Geneva in 1998. Today, she lives and works in Geneva and the interest in her works has been large from day one. Crystel Ceresa has exhibited widely in Switzerland and since 2008 in Denmark. She is represented in several private and corporate collections such as; Academisch Medisch Centrum, Amsterdam, Bank Julius Bär, Basel, Crédit Suisse, Zürich, Zürich Versicherungen, Basel, HSBC, Zürich, Collection Yves Racloz, Geneva and Collection Nicolas Torroni, Geneva.
