«Olaf Breuning»
Tema celeste, Milano, gennaio - febbraio 2004, p. 105-106
Only after having looked at several works by Olaf Breuning together is one capable of fully gathering the spirit that is at its foundation and having the certainty that behind these works an ironic enfant terrible lies hidden. 'What emerges is both a sarcastic, derisive, and satirical attitude while, at the same time, a solid conceptual coherence, marked by the reproposal of
similar elements. The young Swiss artist has managed to transform the MAGASIN into a kind of "House of Horrors" of our childhood memories. There, in the dim shadows and amidst unexpected noises, we know that there's nothing to fear, but are at the mercy of events unknown to us; although aware of the situation, we are afraid. Wigs, coffins, rubber masks, inflatable dolls, saws, an site, skeletons, and ghosts recreated as in the classic iconography with white sheets upon which the artists has drawn large knives dripping with blood, are the ingredients of a voyage into the absurd. The phantasms are the hallucinatory concrerization of a group of drug-taking girls in the video Ghosts (2003); in the installation Hello Darkness (2002), the apotheosis of the artificial, we witness a surreal dialogue about death between a sexy inflatable doll and a skeleton; the video Ugly Yelp (2000) ends with five disturbing figures that wield menacing chain saws in the night; in the video installation First (2003), a young boy, having declared that he was terribly bored, tries to amuse himself with a sexual encounter consummated with indifference, or else by participating in a shoot - our recreated in the total atmosphere of a Western, or again by chasing and mocking a naked boy, forced to wear an ET mask, through the open countryside - a sort of punitive expedition by an urban street gang. Along with the videos and the impressive installations - even the exhibition hall's reception area has undergone an invasion of little skeletons - there are some large format photographs, representing a sort of storyboard, which are hung on panels that depict old buildings with exposed brick. It is here, in fact, that we discover strange characters and improbable situations, like in Vampires (2002), where a few vampires, among them an inflatable doll and a skeleton, seem to be allowing themselves a relaxing moment resting up against a coffin.
Daniele Perra