March 25 - May 3, 2008




For his new solo show at galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Christoph Weber is presenting two new works that were created onsite. During two weeks, Christoph Weber used the gallery space as an art studio.
The first installation is composed of a group of 7 doors, each which has the upper section broken in a violent, yet identical manner. Six of the doors are exact duplicates of the original.
In the gallery, the arrangement of the doors demarcate two different spaces, an outside and inside space. From the outside space, the original door can be viewed from the side from which it has been violently broken. It has a large hole, apparently made from an axe. The viewer can look through the hole in the door and see a space inside, which is almost completely closed. Here all the damaged doors are visible; each bears identical breaches and fragments.
Entitled Trauma this work demonstrates the motif of repetition in a completely Freudian acceptance: when a traumatism affects the psyche and it cannot be progressively dissolved, a conflict arises between the conscious and the unconscious. This conflict manifests itself by repeating the trauma again and again. Christoph Weber’s installation can be seen as recreating the space of the aggressor and of the victim, or rather the victim’s psyche, where the repeated motifs, the same breaches (traumas) occur as if in a closed in a time-loop.
Within the closed space, Christoph Weber’s installation has something uncanny about it. In real life, when events or blows or accidents do reoccur, they can never take the same shape. Each irruption in the real is unique. It is only by moulding and casting (with silicone) that an identical repetition can occur.
Christoph Weber’s other installation “Untitled (Ramponeau)” develops the concept of the “semi-authentic” (Christoph Weber). In his work, Christoph Weber often works with moments of crisis when the civil society, storm into the field of politics. For example, his sculpture entitled, The First Minutes of October, 2007 analyzes the first two minutes of the film October (1927) by Sergeï Eisenstein, which focuses on the decapitation of the statue of Tsar Alexandre III.
For this new work, Christoph Weber took a cobblestone from the location of the last barricade of the Commune of Paris in 1871 (Ramponeau street, Paris 20). Using it as a negative/positive, he created others with paper mache, used notably for cinema décor. The multiplication of the produced cobblestones has a paradoxical effect: on the one hand, this type of repetition tends to empty the original and exhausts the indexed dimension of the historical event; on the other hand, the stones can carry the value of historical confirmation.
This paradox becomes even more manifest when we learn that Christoph Weber fabricated the cobblestones with a paper mache exclusively made from newspapers that predate the Commune, i.e. from a time when other scenarios could have possibly written history. In their materiality, these schizophrenic objects carry the potential of multiple unwritten scenarios, yet their shape evokes a specific historical event that followed.
Together, these two installations by Christoph Weber provoke an impossible scenario, suggesting cause and effect, which turns out to be absurd. Through these works, Christoph Weber also reveals another aspect of his thinking about production of shapes in relationship to history, cinema and psychoanalysis.
Marie-Cécile Burnichon

Translated by Emily Wolff

Christoph Weber was born in 1974 in Vienna where he lives and works.
He studied sculpture at the HGB in Leipzig (professor: Astrid Klein), at Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf (professor: Georg Herold) and in Vienna (professor: Renée Green). He recently exhibited at the Neue Galerie in Graz (solo show, 2007), at the Centre d’art concret in Mouans-Sartoux (2007) and at Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna (solo show, 2007). In 2008, he will have an exhibit at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna.

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JOCELYN WOLFF
78, rue Julien-Lacroix
75020 Paris, France

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