A selection of texts about my work :
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Martin Widmer is a photograph who takes to pieces images in order to investigate. He is writing. Under auto-hypnose or with game cards. He is moving. He is showing his work, organising exhibitions, participating to editions partly in Switzerland where we met.
(Théo Robine-Langlois, A-frame, Paris)
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Martin Widmer is a Swiss artist based in Geneva. He has shown his work in numerous art centers and galleries in Switzerland and abroad. He is also active as a curator, and editor (he was one of the curators of the art center of Neuchâtel from 2012 to 2018).
While initially Martin’s art took shape around photography and sculpture, he has since focused almost exclusively on the photographic medium. He is currently pursuing writing under hypnosis, which he connects with his work in the plastic arts.
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Martin Widmer is a artist whose main mediums are photography and writing. Recently, Widmer began to use the raw materials that usually constitute the photographic object: glass, aluminum plate, glue, wood, cardboard, to create installations in which the viewer would be, as is the case in this exhibition, in a way, immersed in the very device of the image. The texts that the artist writes are written under hypnosis (autohypnosis) as well as using a card game: "Oblique Strategies" (this one was invented, among others, by the musician Brian Eno). These texts prolong, in another space, the plastic work of the artist.
For the project at the Labo, Martin Widmer first wrote, during a session under hypnosis, a text in which he goes to his own vernissage at the Labo. He discovers his exhibition, which he does not know, at the same time as the spectators. This text will be read, along with others, during a reading evening during the exhibition (Wednesday, May 31 at 6:30 pm). We can nevertheless find in the exhibition the plan of this other exhibition.
The actual visible exhibition at the Labo can be seen as one large installation consisting of two sets. Nevertheless, each piece may also be considered as an independent work. The whole exhibition can be seen as a deconstruction "of the photographic object into an installative and sculptural device. A text, "Simple Subtraction", written under hypnosis and with the usual set of cards that the artist use, is inserted in the installation. The exhibition, "The figure of the hero in question", consists mainly of photographs that the artist erases using acetone or using a sander. The artist began, with these works, to erase his own archives of works. Paradoxically, by doing this, Martin Widmer creates new pieces that are almost like paintings. These strange abstract paintings, unexpected, appear on the supports in a random way during a protocol in which the artist has some means to intervene but only in a limited way. As is often the case in his work, it is not so much the disappearance that interests the artist but what appears in place of what has disappeared. If some works appeal to the chance of others unveil the reverse side of the images like this game card placed upside down on a notebook, itself, placed on a stain of glue mixed with coffee grounds. In the same way, the reverse side of a manual of feather carton shows the childish image of a drawing of a little girl. Further, a pencil drawing done under hypnosis completes this exhibition in which everything seems to have been done outside the mastery and the will of the artist placing this one in a role of spectator of the appearance of his own artwork.
(Presentation text for the exhibition at the Labo, Geneva, 2017)
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The Genevan artist Martin Widmer’s show titled “Ambiguity Where Unforgotten Death" is mainly organized around a series of photographs of mirrors and a text that was written under hypnosis. The series Objet VII «Miroirs» (Object VII “Mirrors”) runs counter to the popular belief that photography is a mirror. Widmer offers us the opposite hypothesis by photographing mirrors with neither his nor the camera’s eye appearing in the picture. The images shown at CPG feature the same mirror shot under a range of lighting. Widmer is attempting in this way to define the reality of an object that is seen most of the time without ever being really looked at. As a paradoxical object of our view, the mirror allows the artist to continue to pose the question that runs through his current work, “What does it mean to see?” This question is extended in a text by the artist that is available to visitors to the exhibition and in which a man visits a show whose only work of art, a photograph, resists being seen because it is concealed by reflections on the glass protecting it. Yet this “there’s nothing to see,” this “you can’t see anything,” seemingly the initial reaction of any real or fictional viewer standing before the works, is but the starting point of a visual adventure in which unexpected apparitions do in fact appear.
(Presentation text for the exhibition at the Centre pour la photographie, Genèva 2016)