At first glance, the hand-traced papers scattered across the rough walls of Fuse appear tenuously held together by a loose thread. However, after spending time immersed in this underground space, I can see the quivering line binding the seven series of drawings and paintings beginning to coil tightly, guiding us through the cognitive digressions of the seven artists. In order of appearance, Gritli Faulhaber, Anastasia Vaynberg, Tatjana Blaser, Lina Maria Sommer, Jessica Tille, Hannah Parr and Shervin/e Sheikh Rezaei present their works in the basement. The exhibition Drawing as Metaphor is a simply-staged chorus of distinct visual languages conveyed through the media of painting and drawing. These drawings emerge as immediate constructions of reality with impulses traveling from the artists' limbs to the surface.
Fuse is a newly-opened concept space in the former Gartmann office shop just behind Helvetiaplatz. It showcases and sells a selection of more or less locally crafted products on the ground floor. The space below is dedicated to exhibitions. Fuse’s first show seems to follow a similar scheme to its main room. One needs to take more than a quick look and set aside the idea of concept space to appreciate the delicacies and subtleties of the exhibited works. As one descends the white stairs into the former storage space, Militant Joy greets the visitor in the vestibule, where flickering painted dots and flowers bounce their colours off one another in an interplay drenched in white. Upon entering the main space downstairs and going past the clinical glass wall, the eye is drawn to a series of acrylics by Anastasia Vaynberg, depicting nocturnal marine scenes. The opalescent undulations of waves are silhouetted against a dark Strombolian sea, with its movement meticulously outlined on fragments of wood.
Drawing as Metaphor, Fuse, Zürich, 2024
Moving on, Tatjana Blaser's work echoes this movement with a series of framed drawings that bind together the trails of the soul and mind through ciphered codes. Her six drawings are cartographies dissecting meanings and ideas, navigating the imaginary with houses, limbs, signs, symbols, and chimerae converging in fragmented assemblages, akin to divinatory charts. Symbols of stars, moon-sickles, and crosses on buildings refer to an interest in monotheistic religions, and the visions of their peaceful coexistence stands out in the work. An oscillation between the politically clear and the poetically hidden runs throughout this series, as in the entire exhibition. The line weight recalibrates at other frequencies in Lina Maria Sommer's layered compositions, where a different chorus of geographies emerges from her meditative marks. Her strokes create landscapes that double as complex scores of reverberations and convoluted ruffles.
The partially refurbished exhibition space itself reacts to the threads and colours of the seven artists, with the remnants of its former function serving both as scenography and ambient noise accompanying the drawings’ iteration. A silver ventilation tube frames Sommer's five compositions, while a column serves as a pedestal for Blaser's vertical drawings, like a faceted totem in the room's focal point. The mirrored glass encountered upon descending from the floor above plays with Gritli Faulhaber's two pieces, Militant Joy, delivering a sense of displacement.
Drawing as Metaphor, Fuse, Zürich, 2024
The same ventilation pipe draws the eye further toward an array of framed, ripped pages – last pages from a found, outdated, world history book adorned with minute decorations celebrating the end of each chapter. Jessica Tille rejoices in the ornament with swift firework illustrations, capturing the ambiguity of a primordial marine creature simultaneously exploding above the clouds and within the depths of biological chronicles. The lines of remnants of wall cladding draw the eye to the two sketches by Hannah Parr. Two A4 construction drawings are pinned to the wall as if waiting to instruct a building team.
Drawing as Metaphor, Fuse, Zürich, 2024
Archaic submarine plants overlay the rocky landscape depicted by Shervin/e Sheikh Rezaei in Me Seducing, Us. In this landscape, a geometric arrangement emerges – an array of vicious ornaments and pearls, symbols and geometries from nature, evoking a serious sacred recollection after a bacchanalian banquet.
One could conclude and start again, as the thread now spirals in a cycle of feminine archetypes, with the works looking at each other and their visitors with caring, discerning and seductive glances, exposing their sinuosity, fragility and strengths. Upon returning to the surface, the space and its crafted items are seen through refreshed eyes and the separation between the two floors becomes progressively faint as the experience of visiting the one and the other become indivisible.
Drawing as Memory, Tatjana Blaser, Gritli Faulhaber, Hannah Parr, Shervin/e Sheikh Rezaei, Lina Maria Sommer, Jessica Tille and Anastasia Vaynberg, curated by Johanna Roth, Fuse, 18–31 August 2024