ARDEZ.- Feelings of the season. Feelings of winter. A tangle of compressed time, silent intimacy and cold air leaking into overheated rooms. Winter doesn’t ever arrive cleanly. Sometimes it breaks in overnight, other times it lingers at the edge for weeks.
Feelings of the Season IV includes works by Antonio Ballester Moreno, Mirko Baselgia, Lêna Bùi, Chen Sixin, Klodin Erb, Hu Qingyan, Miao Miao, Loredana Sperini, Rebekka Steiger, Ju Ting, Alice Wang and Wiedemann/Mettler. Twelve artists, twelve positions. Not a theme show but a set of underlying conditions. Each work stands apart, yet all respond to a shared atmosphere.
Some works feel like they have thickened in the cold. Klodin Erb’s Raketen paintings resemble icy icons, hybrids of church and crystal. Each one is named after a real rocket, as if they’re holding their breath before lift-off, lending a muted sense of propulsion to otherwise static images. Erb’s Nachtisch, on the other hand, sets a tone of festive excess. Hybrid figures emerge as overripe offerings: part fruit, part flesh, part ornament. Pleasure and decay settle together, like a party table after the guests leave: crumpled napkins, something sweet still in the air. Alice Wang’s works zoom in, they’re microscopic and cosmic at the same time. Her meteorite scans are silvery, splintered, like ice trying not to break. Lêna Bùi’s paintings flicker between botanical and anatomical. They feel steeped in the seasonal pace: slowed, alert, held close.Like winter itself, they ask for proximity and reward attention over time. Miao Miao’s trees are calm and brittle. Behind them, windows and walls, flattened city textures. They rest in a suspended pause, a kind of compression of memory and time. Rebekka Steiger’s painting conjures a nocturnal scene: two spectral riders moving through a thick blue sky. The scene evokes a deep winter night. The palette is glacial, but pulsing: washes of color flicker and layered pigments settle like cloud cover or cosmic dust.
Feelings of the Season IV takes its cues not from winter itself, but more from how the season behaves. How different works sit in a room when it’s cold outside.
