Pierre Vadi

On the face of it, Vadi’s most recent work Happy Hours appears to be a poetic crystalline landscape, including innumerable broken pieces whose sharp edges flash in the shining light. These imitation shards are made of artificial resin and their different shapes are modeled on beer-bottle designs from various countries. While the title “Happy Hours” alludes to the period that starts after a day’s work and ends before dinnertime — a period during which drinks and snacks are offered at reduced prices — Vadi is not interested in showcasing this phenomenon. Rather, the artist’s fake shards (devoid of color and hence deprived of their original emblematic and cognitive function) turn into generally valid forms, into symbols of consumption, economic relations, production and competition that are the hallmarks of our affluent societies. Vadi calls these works “geopolitical fiction”. Departing from, and pointing beyond, everyday life, his works condense what is unobtrusive and unspectacular into a succinct, artificial, stylized, and generalized formula that induces an interpretative opening. A very recent work created by the artist is made up of transparent casts of animals that have supposedly been run over. They act as dematerialized signs of ephemerality and as contemporary symbols of vanitas. New flag objects which conceptually relate to Vadi’s mappings mark the existence of the non-existing and fictitious.
Text from Sabine Schaschl