“My aim is to create each and every project in both worlds. Material world or not is less important. In the case of most projects, the conceptual strength will remain exactly the same and the spectators will experience just a minimal change in their mental perception. Of course there is, in a certain way, a big difference, but I simply believe that powerful images are as much intimidating as powerful installations and vice versa. In an over visualized world anyway.”
That’s all I’ve gotten while researching about Fabian Bürgy and his artwork titled “Misplaced Nature”. One image and two sentences of artist’s statement and nothing else. It kinda struck me by surprise at the minimal amount of information I could get online (even though I have skills of a renown Facebook stalker) and how could I even possibly write something legitimate about it? But it daunt on me a while after, what if this was the artist intention? Looking at Bürgy site, his works are often minimal and void of description. I don’t even know whether the above is an installation or photograph or a hyper-realistic drawing.
After reading the above artist’s statement given to him via Toildrops, I felt a little better writing this post. In his work “Misplaced Nature”, he juxtaposed a wheat field in a possibly white space with traces of dark earth below. The artwork could have been composed in a different manner to showcase the massive view of the wheat field but Bürgy chose to showcase the wheat field between two columns instead. It created a door to these worlds which he has created. Us going into the wheat field and us going into the space we are in. In this work, he mentioned that the concept of the art never changes despite it being a photo image or installation. He believes the strength of the concept is prevalent in both art forms despite having both very different outputs. It also has given us some great insights on work and space relationships as well as documented texture and physical texture. Does the documented work becomes less of the original art?
Even while writing this post, I tried to avoid being too specific. I was afraid that I might do injustice to the work by wrongly writing. That itself by blurring the boundaries in writing further enhances the conceptual strength Bürgy has mentioned. But at the same time given the minimal description and photo documentation, Bürgy has given the audience the free play to interpret his art.
Image Source: fabianbuergy.com