Sans souci

For its last exhibition of the season, Galerie B-312 is pleased to welcome Sans souci, an exhibition featuring four Berlin artists, Elisabeth Hautmann, Bettina Hoffmann, Andrea Rostásy and Marcus Weber. The project is an idea by Bettina Hoffmann, but it should not be seen as an exhibition by an artist who decides to take on the role of curator. It would be just as pointless to want to recognize a theme that is common to the works, if not, of course, that of a gathering place for thought. The exhibition makes us aware of the "way", different for each artist, with which art opens onto a world of fiction that can surprise us so much because it does not present the context of the physical, historical, social and cultural space-time in which we are immersed second after second. Why are we doing this, if I may put it this way? Why open up - not to mention tearing - the world we are familiar with by summoning one that is foreign to us, and whose works are in some way the threshold? For Marcus Weber, the world is no longer populated by men and women like you and me. Only the heads of the bodies remain, and they have all the attributes of the cook. They float in the air, and are connected by tubes, giving the whole thing the appearance of a network as crazy as it is frightening. In Andrea Rostásy's case, the world is an image that moves slowly, delicately and preciously. It has the appearance of a smooth painting, which only lingers on the gestures of a hand acting on a tool to show all the ingenuity, all the advantages, all the pleasure that can be derived from it, and finally all the unsuspected benefits that remain to be discovered, as long as one acquires it. Elizabeth Hautmann's world and ours have news papers in common. We've got a lot in common. But drawings partially hide their pages, which only deliver some news while others are somehow forbidden to us. One could be frustrated and indignant at such deprivation, but the drawings are ingenious, sensitive and beautiful; they have their logic, and we start to linger over them, until we forget the news that these games of forms deprive us of.  The world is inhabited by groups of people, as you can see in these photographs that fill our photo albums. Yet something strange is added to this world of human beings transformed into two-dimensional statues. Something that seems to have no existence in our own world, until it reminds us of those thoughts, those looks, those judgments we make about others, and which we censor because we cannot say them without taking either a radical risk, or "tweezers", as the saying goes, or, and this is the option of Bettina Hoffmann and her guests, without going through the fiction, of which the visual arts are a variant.

-Translated from a text by Jean-Émile Verdier