Galerie C – Mask exhibition catalog
Source: t-o.studio ToStudio / Galerie C. License: All Rights Reserved.
Galerie C is an independent contemporary art space in Neuchâtel (Switzerland), created in 2011 by Christian Egger. A Parisian branch opened on September 2020. This catalog has been produced at the occasion of the exhibition Mask, presenting the work of artists Ulla von Brandenburg, Valérie Favre, Barthélémy Toguo and Uwe Witter at Galerie C in 2020.
From the introduction by Christian Egger:
There is the other ‘us’… And there is the other than ‘us’.
Why are we often freer when we wear a mask? Why do we dare to live out certain fantasies, certain horrors, when we superimpose another face onto our own? When such questions gnaw at me, I always have the same reflex: I turn to artists. I observe, very carefully, how they approach the question that is mine. From ancient theater to Japanese Noh, via the commedia dell’arte, the mask has always been an integral part of performance. This leads me to wonder: is it through the medium of someone other than ourselves that we manage to be more fully ourselves? Does moving forward in disguise allow us to flee from the fundamental questions of our finitude, our animal nature, or even our solitude? I immersed myself in Jean Starobinski’s “L’interrogatoire du masque” (Éditions Galilée, 2015) and dared to propose it to our four artists. That is how this exhibition at Galerie C came to be —thank you to them for always enlightening me.
Galerie C asked me (Tancrède Ottiger, ToStudio) to come up with a proposal for the catalog. The main challenge was to find a solution to that would bring together the works of four artists, each with their own visual language. The chosen solution ended up being a caption system using tracing paper to mask each work with black rectangles to indicate the title of the work. The overlapping shapes thus enter in dialog with the adjacent pages.
The catalog is set in ToStack, which was developed at the same period than the catalog. The main source of inspiration for ToStack is the typeface Modulo, designed by Illio Negri for Nebiolo in 1978. Modulo was intended to be a skeleton stripped of all detail, without any optical corrections. Building on the process of the Modulo project, which was never completed, ToStack was built from scratch by stacking basic modules without any optical adjustments. Hence its name: “To Stack”. Its primitive construction makes it both modest and distinctive, which were the qualities required to set text next to the diversity of paintings present in this catalog.
Source: t-o.studio ToStudio / Galerie C. License: All Rights Reserved.
Source: t-o.studio ToStudio / Galerie C. License: All Rights Reserved.
Source: t-o.studio ToStudio / Galerie C. License: All Rights Reserved.
Source: t-o.studio ToStudio / Galerie C. License: All Rights Reserved.
Source: t-o.studio ToStudio / Galerie C. License: All Rights Reserved.
Source: t-o.studio ToStudio / Galerie C. License: All Rights Reserved.
This post was originally published at Fonts In Use