Exhibition of the artist Adrian Falkner: Don't sit on the furniture

 

Adrian Falkner became an artist by writing on walls, mixing his voice with that of the city. Today, his artistic gesture is transposed; no longer immediately in contact with the surface of the wall or the floor, but removed in time and to another surface - that of the canvas, in the studio. Like Germaine Roussel or Brassaï**, Falkner takes, isolates, and detaches fragments of this language of the city, the drawings and signs that it creates. He would later go on to draw inspiration from them in his work as a painter. This is demonstrated by his own photographs, presented alongside his paintings. They are visual notes, fleeting, quick, taken during a stroll, a walk from one appointment to the next, or over the course of a longer trip, punctuated by train stations and airports. Huge buildings with a thousand and one windows, scaffolding, fences, tiles, brick walls, floor markings, the remains of a demolished dwelling, billboards... Through Adrian Falkner's photographs, the city can be read like a great palimpsest made up of the old and the new, the ephemeral and the perennial, the accidental and the intentional. All these images form a kind of lexicon, a visual vocabulary whose forms borrow from the written word: lines, grids, tracings, letters, meshes. (...)***

 

In his paintings, clues can be discerned in his visual notes, which have become motifs, grids, imprints. His use of building site tools: painter's tape, sander, tarpaulin, gives his oeuvre the aspect of an unfolding process; like a word perpetually in progress, reminiscent of modern cities in a state of continuous transformation. The materials of his paintings are the materials of the city: paint, paper, fabric, earth, woven plastic... For the artist, painting sometimes means sewing, tearing, taping, peeling, or sanding.

 

As if he wanted to fight against the verticality of the urban world, which separates the spires from the streets, those on top and those at the bottom, Adrian Falkner works in his studio without distinguishing between the walls and the floor, even going so far as to hang protective tarpaulins on the wall, littered with paint stains and footprints. He occupies both surfaces indifferently, and sometimes paces around his paintings as he paces around the streets of Basel.

The city writes, Adrian Falkner translates.

 

* (extract from the text published as a preface to the catalogue)

** and *** see full text