Basel, 4.03.-19.04.2008.




We get out of the car by a country road in front of Markus Gadient's studio, built on the no-man's land in a non-descript place halfway between Basel and the banlieue of Saint-Louis, where a decline in farming and very little real estate speculation contribute to the picture of a dreary remote province, so typical of the French interior, torn between the bygone countryside idyll and the coming thrills of inevitable re-development. Three minutes ago we passed through the Swiss-French border police station without any passport control. It is a bright, crisp February morning, the sun is shining and the place is quiet, almost too quiet, except for some cars passing on the nearby highway. The serenity of the setting notwithstanding, to our left lies the Baggerloch in Hésingue, a dark hilly dumpsite of toxic waste, overgrown with weeds and bushes, reminding one of Tarkovski's "Zone" in his Stalker movie, a contaminated place of strange attraction and spiritual transformation. Perhaps. Years ago, a Basel-based pharmaceutical company paid the French, and disposed of some incinerated material in the middle of the fields. The area has not been recultivated since and it still remains – theoretically – closed, the exact composition of the toxic substance yet to be researched. I ask Markus why the Swiss do not control the cars on their border three days after paintings by Degas, van Gogh, Cézanne and Monet – not to mention two Picassos some days before – were stolen at gunpoint from a private collection in Zurich. "It would have been logistically difficult to organize the border guards in such a short time. Besides there is always a green border," says Markus as we enter the estate, which seems to consist of three small, industrial-looking buildings. A rusty crane towers over the studio container, which is a mobile modular structure of meccano-like steel beams, half-clad with chipboard panels and covered by a flat roof. In the distance, as if in slow-motion, an easyjet aircraft takes off from Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg airport. A private Novartis airport is right next to it, I learn. Further to the right, by the railway tracks, topped with a small water tower bearing the letters SAINT-LOUIS, sit a row of allotments with their makeshift architecture. Markus says they belong to "Algerians", and as I reflect on this unexpected piece of information he goes on to explain that the size of the studio is determined by the size of the container – after being disassembled, the studio fits into one box and can travel elsewhere. Will it ever travel? The quality of impermanence in the construction of the building seems to correspond well with the sense of transience in the surrounding area. All is in flux here, I realize slowly as we continue our slow-paced conversation. "There are gypsies living in those caravans over there." Markus points at a small camp to the left, in a clearing between a road and a field. "They used to stay right next to my place... and also in the hills" he adds, and we enter the studio. The door handle is at knee-height, and the large windows in the upper part of one wall were retrieved from an existing building that was being demolished, their size defining the overall proportions of the structure. Inside, a new series of paintings has been arranged for viewing.

Serendipity it is called, or as Markus elucidates, "die Fähigkeit zu finden, was man nicht gesucht hat" [the capacity to find what one was not looking for > – in other words we always get more than we afford or deserve. It occurs to me that this is very true, as we go on to look at a large, freshly varnished painting on canvas, laid flat in the middle of the space. It belongs to a series begun in Berlin in 2006, where Gadient went to paint at the English park on Pfaueninsel on the Havel river, designed in the mid-19th century by the Frenchman J.P. Lenné, and probably only now, after 150 years, fully grown to the vision of its architect: nature seen as a theatre of shadows, and blinding sunlight pouring through the foliage. The expanse of black paint, shimmering like satin and slightly moist, almost consumes the landscape with a mighty tree and some traces of light on green ground. The painting, like most of Gadient's recent production, involved two phases that are still recognizable in its final form: the time-consuming process of painting a realistic representation of nature, which comes to an abrupt halt in an instantaneous gesture when the image is painted over. Enter abstraction.

"Gegenständigkeit ist nur ein Moment, dann geht's weiter" [the objecthood is only a moment, then things go on > says the artist whose work seems to record phenomena of nature in a state of emergence or withdrawal from being, rather than just existing. The show is due in some weeks, but the vernissage was yesterday, Markus remarks with dry humor, referring to the origin of the word in the act of applying varnish to a finished painting. Other works are hung casually on the walls of the studio, a privileged chance to see paintings in daylight. Small or mid-sized, they develop further some earlier formal concerns and motifs from the series Wildenstein, which depicts ancient oak trees, painted at what is today a public nature reserve near Basel and was previously a privately owned piece of land. As a child, Gadient often visited the site with his father, and he began to paint there in the 1990s. He sat in the landscape like an incarnation of the plein-air painter, he recalls – not without self-irony but also with obvious pride. Deer carelessly wandered around and often approached him, in a cliche of a mythical union between man and nature. He would leave the canvas on site overnight, there were hardly any people around ("and have you seen the Courbet exhibition in Paris?" Markus will ask at some point). I am curious as to whether there have been any perceptible changes in the trees over the last fifteen years, they must be more than 500 years old, since they were planted to commemorate a local warlord Henman Sevogel and the men who fell in the battle of St. Jakob-upon-Birs on August 26, 1444. Wildenstein is a monument to nature, but also a place that is important for the Swiss identity, as the bloody battle between local confederates and Armagnac mercenaries became one of the nation-founding myths during the 19th century. The grass between the trees has been mown in the meantime and no rotting leaves, broken branches or pieces of bark are left to decay, scattered around the trees, says Markus with a touch of sadness. In earlier days each oak was host to a multitude of insects, birds and small animals living on and under it. Now it is all cleaned up. Things change.

Adam Szymczyk


ABOUT ARTIST:
Born 1958 in Olten, Switzerland
Lives and works in Basel, Switzerland

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4056 Basel, Switzerland
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