Aargauer Kunsthaus | Good Vibes for a Good Life

Good Vibes for a Good Life

Augustin Rebetez

Amid flashing strobe lights and dopamine overload, teeming with monsters, hearts, and crosses, decrepit dictators, and cute creepy cats, Augustin Rebetez’s work is sure to have an effect on you. We come out of the Vitamin exhibition with an intense desire to do silly things, to play with fire, to saw beer cans in half or crush milk cartons with our car, just to find out what it feels like, for the pleasure of disruption. Because in Augustin Rebetez’s creations, in the tradition of Jean Tinguely, there is a self-destructive streak which seeks to ridicule the rational and utilitarian aspects of our contemporary societies. That is why everything circulates, everything is recycled, revived, and transformed from one room to the next. Rebetez does his craft, as Lévi-Strauss once said, ‘using the means at hand’, diverting materials from their primary use. And that works out well, since the artist from Jura has turned his home into a studio-museum and the world into a playground.

Foto von Installationsansicht der Ausstellung Augustin Rebetez Vitamin

Installationsansicht Augustin Rebetez. Vitamin 18.2. – 29.5.2023, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau Augustin Rebetez, Studio Mistake, 2023 In Zusammenarbeit mit Colin Jeanneret, Stanislas Delarue, Lia Martinelli, Zoé Philipona Foto: ullmann.photography

In the quiet Aargauer Kunsthaus Museum, Augustin Rebetez invites us on an initiatory journey that defies the institution’s white walls and shocks the bourgeois, saturating the space from floor to ceiling so it flashes and blares everywhere.

Beneath that ghost-train exterior and ‘What the Fuck’ aesthetic, typical on the Internet, the exhibition delivers a shot of energy, gently caressing our hair in one direction and making it bristle in the other. Mirroring the different emotions that run through us—from chill out to party mood, from satanic to spiritual—the artist’s complete work is a compendium of humour and love, populated by ghosts and strange birds in the spirit of Ballenesque. But unlike the photographer Roger Ballen, working in the slums of Johannesburg to reveal their latent flaws, Rebetez calls in the bizarre to better extract its essence, its vital impulse.

Installationsansicht Augustin Rebetez. Vitamin 18.2. – 29.5.2023, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau Augustin Rebetez Internal Relations, 2023 In Zusammenarbeit mit Michèle Martin Untitled, 2023 in Zusammenarbeit mit Jeanne Broquet Fotos: ullmann.photography

Everything is alive, connected, linked, caught in a web of bonds of friendship and love, but also gears and chain reactions. Halfway through, a room enveloped in milky white tones is the result of a collaboration with his mother, painter, and decorator Michèle Martin. In the central patio, bronze birds evoking family or the link between heaven and earth were made in collaboration with the bell foundry Rüetschi AG in Aarau.

Installationsansicht Augustin Rebetez. Vitamin 18.2. – 29.5.2023, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau Augustin Rebetez, THE FAMILY, 2023 Foto: ullmann.photography

In another room, Rebetez has partnered with Moroccan Beni Ouarain rug weavers to promote artisanship and the symbolism of cryptic languages. He thus revives the memory of long-forgotten ancestors and cosmogonies, as if to ward off the appropriation of traditional Berber motifs by IKEA.

Between each room, rugs create transitions or thresholds to a new universe as we move from darkness to light, from noise to silence. The experience is meant to be immersive, total, spiritual, and colourful. Wacky in some places, ‘serious’ in others, it mimics and undermines the logic of enchantment. Because our globalised world is in itself a kaleidoscope, steeped in contradictions, stupidity, or cuteness that captures and consumes our attention, plunging us into a deep lethargy, both hypnotic and hallucinatory. Irony and derision then become companions, revitalising the relationship with creation and action in a kind of Dostoyevskian idiocy that exalts cracks, doppelgangers, and epileptic structures.

Installationsansicht Augustin Rebetez. Vitamin 18.2. – 29.5.2023, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau Augustin Rebetez, The Black Church, 2023 In Zusammenarbeit mit Leo Regazzoni Foto: ullmann.photography

And to cure our ills, Rebetez sets up, with Léo Regazzoni, a chapel ‘for the health of endangered souls’ while offering some friendly advice in the practical guide serving as an exhibition catalogue. In a punchy, punky, and childish style, he blackens the pages with charcoal, embellishing them with various mantras telling everyone to do what they can. ‘Practices Vandalism’, ‘Make a table’, ‘Expand the Ritual’, ‘Delete your Data’, ‘ After Death Stay a Ghost ’, ‘Print Newspapers Fake Money Manifestos and Books’…

The proliferating, even insane dimension of his work is, in essence, merely a reflection of our TikTok era. Rebetez observes its absurdities without judging, but nevertheless manipulates its incongruities to reveal their hidden mechanisms. Through humour and satire, he short-circuits their inner workings and images in order to exude good vibes for a good life.

Text by Marion Zilio

Installationsansicht Augustin Rebetez. Vitamin 18.2. – 29.5.2023, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau Augustin Rebetez The Good Life, 2023 Direct colors, 2023 In Zusammenarbeit mit Mélissa Guex Hope is not a future, 2023 Garbage, 2021 Foto: ullmann.photography