J u n e J o o n J a x x | Q&A with FABIAN BÜRGY

From top to bottom: 

Black Cloud, Bursting floor (Birth), Black is coming, Paint Blast, Fissure

Fabian Bürgy is a swiss based Sculptor and Digital Creative. His diverse and playful artistic practice, which includes sculpture, installation and digital imaging, explores the conceptual aesthetic of things through random encounters of materials, misplaced situations and spatial relationships.

So Fabian, your work has the power of triking and deceiving our eyes.  Do you find similar situations in reality or is it pure optical illusion and virtuality?

With my work I try to walk the thin line between reality and virtuality. Sometimes my artwork is physically "real" and sometimes it's only a digital illusion. I started to work this concept because it allows me to move on with my creative work quickly. I fear to get stucked with the downside of physical creation: In particular I am talking about storing space, money for materials, time to organize everything and time to actually create it. Yet, most of my artworks could actually be displayed in a real space. From my point of view, contemporary art doesn't need to have a spacial and physical existence today. The digital world is part of our world and art can and should reflect this state of our current world. This is one of the primary and key roles of art: It has to show the current state of the culture. And the time we live in just happens to be on the edge of a massive and epic shift towards virtuality. 

You transform mundane objects and materials into installations. What comes first? The random encounter of the objects, or the thought and concept of the piece?

It comes often at the same time. I am observing the world and I project my creativity on objects. I often combine two extremely opposite feelings and objects and evolve a condition around it. They get a soul and a meaning through my work. What also happens to me sometimes is that I see for example a lonely bin in the streets I might ask myself: What if he could talk, what's could be his story. 

In Black Cloud and Fissure, there's the presence of meteorological and atmospheric conditions. What role does the environment and nature play in your work? 

At the time when I created those works I was fascinated by the violent misplacement of things. A cloud has nothing to do in a closed space. A fissure in the floor is on the opposite side of our common understanding of aesthetics. This is where I work, on the edge of understanding and between extreme conditions.

There's a minimal and peaceful atmosphere in your work. What's behind the subject matter of including violence even though at first it doesn't seem to be present?

The peaceful atmosphere you describe comes from the spectator himself, it's what happens to us humans when we see something that we don't understand or that is too strange not to look at. I am an observer and fascinated by the extremes.Throughout nature you can observe that everything is built on two poles. There is night and day, cold and warm, birth and death, happiness and sadness...even the faces of humans are similar in extreme sadness and pure sexual lust. Everything is often so amazingly close to each other. It's a bit like every extreme needs his opposite power and connects somewhere with it. They connect and exchange their presence and depend on each other to survive. This is basically what fascinates me because I still don't understand it. This is what my art is all about. About the things I don't understand. I try to find connections where there's no obvious link, combinations of impossible things that become obvious. 

Where does your creative process starts and ends, in order to achieve a physical result from an abstract idea?

My creative process starts by observing the everyday and by collecting thoughts, objects and moments. When I am ready, I give birth to the ideas in the form of a picture of a physical installation. This can take sometimes several years or sometimes only a few hours - depending on the urge of the idea and my personal state of being. 

Once your work is completed, do you think space itself and emptiness are crucial elements for its lecture?

Yes, space and emptiness are essential for the focus of the spectator. It is impossible to enjoy or understand the work in a distracted space. It simply loses presence because my work is not visually loud enough and demands a moment of reflexion.

What new projects have you been working on recently? 

I just finished a series of objects called "Objects with an attitude". Basically they are plastic cups with hair on it, a lovely simple idea. Moreover I am working on my "High voltage objects", a series of installations where the whole thing is set under a slight electric current. I like the idea of art that you can touch and combined with electricity this seems an exciting experience. You can see my latest work on www.fabianbuergy.com

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