Gil Pellaton
Bo Butterfly
25 May – 7 July 2024

How might a work of art that was born of the imagination but eschews utopias so as not to lose sight of reality actually look? The Amden Atelier's exhibition of Gil Pellaton tells of an absent, mute figure, traces of which, and of its habitat, can be discovered inside the barn. This site-specific installation respects the historical building – long ago stripped of its original purpose – as a sculpture anchored in its environs, while at the same time addressing it as an ahistorical location. The beauty of its surroundings and the simplicity of its infrastructure make the barn a challenging location for artists. The titular figure of the exhibition, Bo Butterfly, remains a fictional character. The artist himself speaks of his show as a poem dedicated to co-existence as a strategy for surviving the current turmoil.

It is as if the exhibition presented a kind of at-rest state, which we, as its audience, can activate. Pellaton worked with the peculiar light conditions inside the barn and drew on the crudeness of its architecture, in which the vertical relative to the horizontal thrust of the elements plays a key role. It is an exhibition that follows an aesthetic of interconnectedness and that, through its distinctive visual language and the interplay of the exhibited objects, appeals to our powers of the imagination, which is what all art should do.

Coming after Smiling dog, Woo-hoo the chimeric we and Hennissement, this is the first exhibition to feature this new group of works by the artist.