Maison de Poupées
Fabian Marti and Pentti Monkkonen at Acrush, Zurich
My friend Fabian Marti showed me his recent paintings, which depict his poodle “Lutz” morphing into baroque squiggles. They reminded me a bit of Giacomo Balla’s “Dynamism of Dog on a Leash.”
I pictured Fabian in his trench coat, with Lutz on a leash, strolling around Paris and sitting in cafés.
This led me to envision remnants of a dinner: empty bottles, oyster shells, stubbed-out cigarettes, and dirty plates, much like in Daniel Spoerri’s “Snare Pictures.” I admire these works as snapshots of a specific time and place—Paris in the early ‘60s. Spoerri captured the chaos of the dinner table, complete with smeared sauces and discarded cigarette packs.
Similarly, Fabian’s paintings emerge from a swirl of the subconscious of large language model imagery, like Spoerri’s dinner tables, capturing the present moment with all its unique visual characteristics. One day, we may look back at early art of this genre, just as we now see the “Mail Art” of Spoerri’s Fluxus peers as both quaint and prescient. Robert Filliou even described it as an “Eternal Network,” developing alongside the early ARPANET.
During the height of the Vietnam War in 1969, Claes Oldenburg sculpted a plywood tank topped with an inflatable lipstick at Yale University. This exaggerated scale of the lipstick, set in a place traditionally reserved for military icons, conveyed a clear anti-establishment message. Oldenburg’s focus on enlarging everyday objects led to a successful career, resulting in public sculptures like “Spoonbridge and Cherry.”
Interestingly, inflatable “dummy” tanks have been used for deception in warfare from WWII to modern-day Ukraine.
The idea of transforming everyday objects by scaling them up was seen as early as Picasso’s “Glass of Absinthe” in 1914, where he used a spoon as part of the sculpture itself.
In espionage, mundane objects are also repurposed: weapons like the infamous “Bulgarian umbrella,” or pens turned into cameras. With smartphones and advanced software today, Fabian covertly scanned the “Jester” sculpture at the Musée Picasso, repurposing it into a finial for his own walking stick...
