Galerie Chantal Crousel is pleased to announce the sixth solo exhibition by Fabrice Gygi, one of the most influential Swiss artists of his generation. The artist presents a set of large works on paper in conjunction with two sculptures in Corten steel.

In 2010, Fabrice Gygi initiates a rupture in his work by abandoning the practice of installations in favor of sculpture. First, though the creation of jewelry, which lasted several years. Radically new in construction, with basic geometrical shapes, these pieces are driven by a determination to strip the object of all sensuality. Likewise, the volumes of his newest sculptural works and bas-reliefs, modular combinations of cubes and rectangular cuboids, or parallelepipeds, abolish the curve and the oblique, adopting the elegance and purity of abstract lines. The golden ratio applies to the sculpture whose articulated cubes are assembled in a decreasing order. The interplays of scale and shape, of full and hollow, and of positive and negative spaces, are evocative of architectural prototypes.

Fabrice Gygi composes his watercolors with horizontal and vertical lines. After several months spent in Marfa, in the Chihuahua desert, he starts exploring the complexities of lines. Rejecting the curve, they obey the same rules of form he previously applied to his sculptures. Discipline and determination are the key words. Painted in a single stroke in overlapping layers, they attest to an extreme tension in execution and to the artist’s search for a harmony between concentration and rigidity, an effort to achieve ideal self control in wielding the brush. Each piece exists in a state of absolute balance between perfection and accident, creating a constant energy intensified by the living.

These large watercolors offer a range strictly confined to six hues, extended to variations determined by the artist. We can retrace the roots emblematic of Gygi’s practice, as he emphasizes the inherent power of an object by distilling it to its most minimal essence.