INTERVIEW: Karine Tissot

One of Art Paris Art Fair, advantages is the section Guest of Honour, which each year gives the possibility to the visitors, apart from the French and International Galleries, to come into contact with the Visual Art Scene of a Country or a Region. For its 20th Edition Art Paris Art Fair presents Switzerland as Guest of Honour, through a major and concentrated tribute through time. The section’s Curator Mrs. Karine Tissot (Art Historian and independent exhibition Curator, in charge of the Yverdon-les-Bains Contemporary Art Centre (CACY), as she explain, she chooses to present artists from the 60s & 70s until today, who use different media and their influence on the International Art Scene, noting “I think that artists like Le Corbusier did influence a lot others artists in the world for instance. But for sure, not a lot of people know that he’s Swiss”.

By Dimitrios Lempesis & Efi Michalarou
Photo: Art Paris Art Fair 2018 Archive

Mrs. Karine Tissot as we know Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s played a key role in the course and shaping of Contemporary Art. Through your choices of both Galleries and Artists since about a hundred contemporary and emerging artists are presented by 13 Swiss and European Galleries, what is your goal?
Diversity and discovery are the key words of Art Paris Art Fair. The goal is to show new artists who are less known in France than the artists of the international star system. I have developed a curatorial project in the fair to show various aspects of the Swiss contemporary art scene in order to show as well some aspects of our multicultural country (*) with some links to our history(**):
• The presentation of Helvetia Art Collection’s (one of the largest corporate art collections in Switzerland)latest acquisitions focusing on emerging talents (www.artparis.com/en/special_projects)
• A video art programme in the Project Room that provides a forum for 25 Swiss women artists from different generations (http://www.artparis.com/en/talks) – (**). It conceptually brings together the history of art and Swiss civil history: the arrival of this new medium in Switzerland in the 70s coincided with women acquiring the right to vote, which was introduced on a federal level in February 1971.
• A programme of digital projections on the Grand Palais façade which showcases a highly innovative generation of Swiss artists including Camille Scherrer, Alan Bogana and Yves Netzhammer (www.artparis.com/en/video_projections) – three artists whose origins are representative of three of Switzerland’s four different linguistic and cultural regions (*), respectively French, Italian and German-speaking Switzerland.
• 4 monumental walls of the north and south naves will host four all-over wall compositions designed specifically for the fair by Renate Buser, Christian Gonzenbach (Galerie C), Sébastien Mettraux and Christoph Rüttimann (presented by Mai 36 Galerie).(www.artparis.com/en/bookstore)
Based on what criteria did you make the above choices? Why are you mixing generations and expressive means? From Painting, Sculpture and Architecture to Conceptual Art with artists like: John M. Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Urs Lüthi etc.?
It would be illusory to try and sum up contemporary Swiss art by reducing it to a specific approach. The term should simply be considered as an umbrella term that covers a wide array of extremely different positions that range from a taste for minimalism to a decidedly offbeat sense of humour, not forgetting objects, materials, poetry, performance art, video art and collaborative artistic practices such as those of RELAX chiarenza & hauser & co, Gerda Steiner/Jörg Lenzlinger and Lutz & Guggisberg. Leading artists like Pipilotti Rist belong to a connected art world: their works travel from museum to museum and from biennial to biennial all over the world. Let’s not forget either the emerging new talents. Artists today no longer limit themselves as a matter of principle to any one medium; they use different processes and techniques depending on their artistic objectives. One of the strengths of Art Paris Art Fair is that it abides by the three unities: the unities of time, place and action, which means that visitors aren’t dispersed. I’ll wager that the 2018 edition will reveal the breadth and depth of Swiss art.
Galerie Andres Thalmann is establishing a dialogue between Swiss Artists (Katja Loher, Guido Baselgia and Barbara Ellmerer) and French Painter Claude Viallat. In your opinion what are the inherent connection between French and Swiss Artists?
Today we can simply say that French and Swiss artists are before all artists of the world. We are living in a connected world thanks to the new technologies and artists travel a lot. Switzerland is France’s first neighbour to the East. To quote Yves Aupetitallot: “[…] The general characteristic that would seem to constitute the lowest common denominator in a universal description of Switzerland would be one of heterogeneity, which is the prerequisite for the construction of its unity and in total contradiction with France’s supposed homogeneity.” Located in the centre of Europe and characterised by its multilingual society, which is a source of rich cultural exchange, it is difficult for Switzerland to pinpoint a clear cut identity that would define it as a nation, one that would be valid no matter the domain, the visual arts included. So, France’s neighbour doesn’t have a dominant culture.
Correspondingly certain European Galleries have chosen to pay tribute to Swiss creativity. On the same booth, Eric Mouchet and Zlotowski galleries are juxtaposing Le Corbusier’s paintings and drawings with Matthieu Gafsou’s series of photos “La Chaux-de-Fonds” (Le Corbusier’s hometown). How much do you think Swiss Artists influenced other European Artists in the past and how much today?
I think that artists like Le Corbusier did influence a lot others artists in the world for instance. But for sure, not a lot of people know that he’s Swiss. No one thinks that Pierrette Bloch, Germaine Richier, or Louis Soutter were Swiss and indeed they were. Some of them, as Le Corbusier, could see no way of furthering their ambitions within the Swiss borders and went to a foreign country. It’s a nice way to tribute to Le Corbusier who spent his childhood in La Chaux-de-Fonds with the photographs of Matthieu Gafsou. Since 30 years, I guess that Swiss artists are taking an active part in the renewal of contemporary art worldwide.

Info: Art Paris Art Fair 2018, Fair DirectorDirector: Guillaume Piens, Grand Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill, Paris, Days & Hours: Wed (4/4) 18:00-22:00 (by invitation only), Thu & Sat (5 & 7/4) 1:30-20:00, Fri (6/4) 11:30-21:00, Sun (8/4) 11:30-19:00, Catalogue: €20, Entrance fee: Adults and children over age 10: €25, Students and groups of 10 or more: €12, Free admission for children under age 10, www.artparis.com

First Publication: www.dreamideamachine.com
© Interview- Dimitris Lempesis & Efi Michalarou