“Imagine” Installation view. Photo: Yangian ©Peres ProjectsPeres Projects presents “Imagine” by Yves Scherer (b. 1987 in Solothurn, CH), the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in Asia.
Scherer’s practice is multidisciplinary and diverse, encompassing figurative sculptures in aluminum and pink onyx, stylized paintings, and mixed-media works. Identity, as well as the human figure and its representation, are focal points in his practice, which he expands on in Imagine by depicting archetypical human figures, marking a distinct shift away from the celebrity images that are common to his earlier work.
In this exhibition, Scherer asks his audience to imagine without prescribing a particular vision—a possible future, a happy past, an enticing fiction—maintaining his consistent interest in the murky boundary between reality and illusion. He engages with narrative by establishing relationships between certain works, between the sculptural figure of a boy picking flowers, for example, and an abstract canvas of flowers. Not only this, but for Scherer, material has great metaphorical significance. He references a distinctly human quality in metal, given that the substance is the result of industrial processes and permits the artist a great degree of precision in rendering hyperrealism in human subjects.
Metal also serves as a potent counterpoint to the profound durability of stone, and its suggestion of the eternal. In stone, time works on a sublime scale, and in this exhibition what we are called on to imagine is not only a specific, human-sized narrative, but the timeless magnificence of nature. The artist’s attraction to pink onyx in particular relates to its translucent lightness, its blend of strength and soft, fragile beauty. It is through this delicate yet solid matter that Scherer reinforces his central theme: the unassailable and exquisite love of family.
