Slots, a topical headline, as it concerns, among other things, “take-off and landing clearance slots” for aircraft . Networks can be bought and sold, for air transport, telecommunications, but also networks of influence, networks of thought, artistic networks, which need invitations outside their own territory in order to assert themselves.

This is what the Kunsthalle Palazzo offers us, by inviting these six artists to come down to Liestal station. While maintaining for each of the works its autonomy, its identity, “Slots” is a collective form. A game, with rules, colours, materials and various subjects, is set up between the pieces of the different artists.
The works proposed by these artists for Slots, are abstract, organic, haptic, optical, with painted, dry and greasy surfaces. They deal with metamorphosis, composition, light, colour, abstraction, a certain idea of fiction. They allow you to “take off” from one universe to another, immaterial and imaginary.

For Slots, Cédric Teisseire created two proposals for a wall, one on the façade of the Palazzo, the other signalling the beginning of the exhibition, Les trois miroirs (2003) by Véronique Joumard geniusfully shift our attention towards space. But beyond allowing sharp, different and original points of view on the exhibition, or on the landscape outside, they above all offer us a blurred reading of our own reflection.
A universe where the image has disappeared, a foggy world, where we cannot focus from the front.

David Renaud’s device Sans titre (2003), consisting of six circular platforms equipped with motors, is placed on the ground. On each of the circular “tables” are represented a kind of coloured molecule. These concentric motifs, a sort of roto-relief, water lilies, machine organisms, double the revolving effect. Naturally, we circulate, we bend down to look, physically and mentally caught up in this imaginary universe.

Emmanuelle Villard makes visual objects that she installs, perhaps even stages, no longer within the framework of a blank wall, but at the heart of a device drawn on the wall. She envisages the exhibition of her shapes, now without motifs, full, swollen, bloated or empty, folded, from which she has expelled the frames, creating the visual support that takes their place as a showcase. Further on, a small painting, both genesis and signature of the artist’s work.

Hugues Reip and Christophe Cuzin develop an essential relationship with space. They set up their territory by combining discreet invasion, lightness and efficiency. To questions related to space, they formulate answers to the context, to the place. Christophe Cuzin questions the links between painting and the built environment, using colour in monochrome units, with a roller, without any sign of facture. For Slots, he creates a pictorial environment, red as red, for the exhibition corridor. Hugues Reip, draws the space, drawing lines with wire. Aerial environment, tenuous visual space. These are two devices determined by the characteristics of the place, in situ, in the sense that this notion signals an explicit organic link between given elements and their situation.

Claire Le Restif