Reto Pulfer - Capsicum Ofifusiani

About

“I have never made a red room before. Usually, my immersive environments are informed by hues of blue and turquoise. My guitar is red, but the colour of my novels I don’t yet know.

I am just about to dig a trench surrounded by stones and replanted nettle, fern and wild thyme. The axis of the trench points to the place where Scorpio’s main star Antares rises, which at night shines in deep red on the southern summer sky.

I have always kept my distance to the colour red. I mean, I use the colour, but normally just sparsely. Equally, it took me 20 years of art making to pursue small scale painting. I paint on rags, torn pieces of linen, bedsheets. I am ashamed that there is a book called Painting on my desk as I don’t usually have books in my studio.

My studio models are plants I nd in the woods and chilli growing on my balcony. There is something precarious about working with chillies, which reminds me of my performance works. For instance, there is a performance from 2001 called Me and the Ghosts I made when I was staying in Indonesia. There was an earthquake and my neighbours said that it was triggered by spirits. I tried seeing them myself. But what do you do with ghosts once you see them?

A ghost is both preluded and hunted by a swift visible shadow. This is very similar to playing electric guitar with an echo delay effect. The sound keeps jumping around and coming back in altered states.

I intended this exhibition to be an extension or translation of my catalogue, but instead it departed from what I am familiar with and took a new turn.” (Reto Pulfer)

Reto Pulfer (b.1981 in Bern, lives and works in Berlin), his monograph Zustandskatalog: Catalog of States and Conditions was published by Sternberg Press in 2017 on the occasion of recent solo exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland; Musée régional d’art contemporain, Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerrannée, Sérignan, France; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière, France; Fórum Eugénio de Almeida, Évora, Portugal. Recent Group exhibitions include: X Bienal de Nicaragua, Léon; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunsthal Kristiansand, Norway. He is a laureate of the 2016 Swiss Art Awards.