Seit gut zwölf Jahren arbeitet der Künstler Yves Netzhammer an einem poetischen Bilderkosmos. Seine Zeichnungen, Rauminstallationen und mit dem Computer errechneten Videofilme faszinieren durch ihre körperhafte Ausstrahlung. Auf ungewohnte Weise gleiten in ihnen mental tiefwurzelnde und gesellschaftlich aktuelle Bildzeichen ineinander. Die entstehenden Zeichenkonglomerate und Modellsituationen knüpfen durch ihre formal verbindliche Eigengesetzlichkeit neue Bezüge zwischen Welt und Bild.

Für den Schweizer Pavillon der Biennale Venedig konzipiert Yves Netzhammer eine Rauminstallation, in der sich Zeichnung, Architektur, Videoprojektion und Ton durchdringen. Eine schräge Ebene schneidet quer durch den Südostteil des Pavillons: Über den Garten spannt sie sich als Dach, im Inneren des Skulpturensaals bildet sie einen um acht Grad geneigten Zwischenboden. Grossflächige Bildarbeiten in Schablonentechnik sind im Gartenbereich als Deckenmalerei, im Skulpturensaal als Bodenmalerei angebracht. Die Dachschräge ragt über die Gartenmauer hinaus und kann von Aussen eingesehen werden. In ihre Bildmotive passt der Künstler vier Videoprojektionen ein, erweitert um eine räumlich ausgelegte Tonspur von Bernd Schurer. Ein im Skulpturensaal gezeigter, gut 40 Minuten langer Videofilm bündelt und fokussiert die Bildprogramme der Aussenprojektionen und der Boden- und Deckenmalereien. Die Bodenschräge schärft die Wahrnehmung.

Yves Netzhammer bezieht sich mit «Die Subjektivierung der Wiederholung. Projekt A (Venedig)» auf den überhitzten Kreislauf der Medienbilder. Seine Bildarbeiten unternehmen es, dem Subjekt Empfindungsdimensionen für politische Zusammenhänge zu erschliessen. Indem sie Bild-Stereotype «des Fremden» und unkonventionelle, neue Ansichten des Eigenen aneinander reiben, stellen Netzhammers Bilder die Vorurteile unseres Bilderdenkens zur Debatte und räumen «dem Fremdem» den ihm zukommenden, widerständigen Platz ein.

For over twelve years the artist Yves Netzhammer has been working on a broadly disparate, poetic picture cosmos. His drawings, room installations and computer-generated video films fascinate due to their physical charisma and their formal clarity. Based on the playful energy of re-combination they gingerly grope towards the dark side of our existence: the pleasant is combined with the unpleasant, the dead and the living coalesce into beings never before seen, and the scenarios depicted run the gamut of every size on the scale, from microscopic to gigantic. Netzhammer persistently pushes the boundaries of sensation, his own and others’, producing pictures with a vivid presence, in which the hierarchy between people, animals, plants and objects becomes fluid. The frighteningly beautiful interim arrangements that result challenge our visual preconceptions. The artist forges new forms of empathy and compassion by exploring the edges of the self, specifically the vulnerability and finiteness of the human body and the cultural conditioning of the subject.

Narrative level and picture realm

For the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Yves Netzhammer has designed a room installation in which drawing, architecture, video projection and soundtracks all interact. He has extended the south-eastern part of the pavilion, erected by Bruno Giacometti in 1951, with an architectural/sculptural intervention that shifts the relationship between inside and outside. A steep plane rises from the rear edge of the sculpture room, covers the garden area and towers over the garden wall, stretching out towards the adjoining "Viale Harald Szeemann". In the garden area this plane forms a roof, on the underside of which Netzhammer has stencilled huge images. The painted ceiling, into which four video projectors are inserted, is partially visible outside the pavilion. In the interior of the sculpture room the plane forms a mezzanine floor that is reached by two wedge-shaped ramps. It has an incline of 18 degrees which sharpens the awareness of one’s own body within an enclosed space. A floor painting takes up the motif of the ceiling painting in the garden area and the subject matter of the video film that is projected on the wall pursues the newly created spatial situation. A 14-channel soundtrack, performed by the musician Bernd Schurer, literally pervades the visual ensemble since it is laid out across the room. The inserted "narrative level" structures the pavilion by generating a reading experience in space. With its dynamic line drawings and stippling via sight and sound attractors, it multiplies the experience of space and time and articulates a sophisticated relationship between picture, movement and narrative.

The possibility of an impossible touch

With his contribution to the Venice Biennale, Yves Netzhammer makes reference to the context of a show based on the achievements of specific nations. The architectural placement of an inclined plane to both penetrate and open up the pavilion takes its cue from the wish to invest the visual idiom with a potential that cannot unfold where there are national and international boundaries. In his pictorial works and films for Venice, Netzhammer pits stereotypes of "the alien" against unconventional, new views of his own. "The alien" appears in the form of repressed, psychological subject matter, unseen body innards, shadow bodies, different skin colours and signs of cultural otherness. The coalescence of these motifs creates unusual relationships of self and alien, individual case and universal problem, in an effort to overcome reduction to opposing dualities and provoke discussion of the mechanisms of self-localisation. Netzhammer’s Venice project attempts to translate concerns of great impact into a visual idiom, thereby enlisting the emotional potential of pictorial means to allow the self to become receptive to the alien.

In Netzhammer’s gauging/searching approach, the "world" does not appear as an available, negotiable mass, but as a complex other with a dignity of its own. This impression arises from the specific relationship between form and movement. The processes intimated in Netzhammer’s drawings and the gestures that appear in his video films generate a very specific impression of physicality. The picture experience transmits a sense of possible materiality, a heightened sensitivity to its significance. Insofar as Netzhammer’s works allow the paradoxical "possibility of an impossible touch" to be experienced, they also sharpen the senses to the phenomena of the material world whilst respecting their incomprehensibility – wonders that can never be understood or described in their entirety. The artist implements this extension and conservation of a multiplicity of world phenomena through precise handling of recalcitrant signs and through subtle composition that informs his pictures with a sensitivity to the world. "Figuration" and "form" in Netzhammer’s oeuvre mean the exact demarcation and appreciation of impressions – impressions of incomprehensible and alien circumstances – that should be promised a place in our culture to help influence its boundaries.

Tim Zulauf