Colors on Speed
Rico Weber (1942-2004)
16 March – 26 May 2018
Colors on Speed, the first solo exhibition by Rico Weber (1942-2004) at Galerie Maria Bernheim and first solo exhibition in almost 20 years, focuses on the artist’s obsessive creation towards, what he coined as, 3D photography. Presented here is an almost never before seen body of work exploring the television in the variety of forms and visuals it both contains and projects. Throughout we see a groundbreaking attempt to accurately fix the strange movements of the colors created by cathode ray tubes, and the narrative structures forced into daily life by this, now defunct, technology.
We forget but, until not so long ago, a major part of our common history was reduced to colored impulsions exploding behind glass, producing iridescence and saturation. The present was transformed into a color stream and carried into the living rooms of society. These colors created an analogic relationship to the world, present in our lives like lava lamps, they represented our most objective mirror as well as a screen between us and the rest of the space.These images were part of our interior, emerging from little strange black boxes.
In that particular context, when entertainment became larger than life, the artist decided to develop his very personal and empirical research. His ties to Pierre Restany and the "Nouveaux Realistes" group link him to an attempt at catching a new reality of the color, furthering in particular his fascination for motor sports, he explores the extreme speed that the television technique offers to colors. The result is a series of detailed resin casts of televisions filled with compositions of stolen and fiddled with images. The eternal static.
The explosions, the crashes, the new heroes, the glossy machines, the faraway shining light, only demonstrate that modernity has its limits, that the representation of the world keep remains flat and without dimension. Rico Weber's ambition to reveal this discrepancy somehow sheds light on art history's long pointless and outdated obsession to reduce everything to a bi-dimensional system and the digital revolutions that thought that perception could be summarized as a numeric sequence. It is yet undeniable that our emotions allow us to see the speed of colors.
Samuel Gross
