Artist: Samuel Haitz
Exhibition title: Hermeneutics
Venue: Triangolo, Cremona, Italy
Date: June 22 – August 3, 2024
Photography: ©Julian Blum, all images courtesy of the artist and Triangolo, Cremona
There’s that line in How to Loose a Guy in 10 Days, where Andy snaps at Ben in the cinema: “Who is she? You can’t watch Meg Ryan for two hours and not be thinking about another girl!” Walking into a show titled Hermeneutics, we can be sure that what we see isn’t exactly what we’re going to get, but that there is another layer of meaning beyond what immediately meets the eye. That Meg Ryan isn’t actually Meg Ryan, but a perfect silver screen for anyone’s sprawling desire.
Over both floors of Triangolo, 23 scanned page spreads, in which Kathy Acker traces the tumultuous romance between poets Rimbaud and Verlaine (R & V), are layered with candid snapshots. Pastel skies over familiar cities, the insides of a minimally decorated bedroom, dogs on leashes, dick pics. Scenes from the life of a twentysomething artist, wallowing in contemplation on how life is best to be lived. Immanently, the two narrative strands, albeit seemingly unrelated, weave into a place of speculation, a fiction within fiction.
Our protagonist, it appears, is neither V nor R, but S, an enthralled reader who hangs onto phrases here and there, making them his own. Like the juvenile urge to hoard stories that mirror a sense of self, he highlights these phrases in a way that isolates them from the rest of the text, granting them some sort of pronounced articulation. In The Hatred of Poetry, poet Ben Lerner states, rather theatrically, how he can only really enjoy poetry when recited in prose. Where “the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.” Where the poetic somehow signals the possibility of another world, only accessible when held up against the backdrop of our shitty little lives.
When R & V recklessly fuck their way around Europe, broke, drunk, chased by cops or their resentful spouses, tenderness and cruelty sometimes seem so close it’s hard to tell the difference. What is it about this desire to feed off others’ pain? Does it make one’s own feel truer, more real? Rimbaud was known for his compulsively groomed appearance. Slick, combed-back hair, creaseless clothing, posture like a wooden soldier. Perhaps an attempt to contain an inside of desolate chaos. Acker, on the other hand, shaved her head and pierced her lobes with a needle in an attempt to cleanse herself from her Upper East Side upbringing. I have a theory that the most outwardly composed people are often the most fucked up. On the flip side: Never trust a rich punk.
S knows these codes well, only ever hinting at a trace of wildness trapped within these bourgeoise box frames. The depicted scenes, familiar to some and enigmatic to most, offer as much of S’ story as he chooses to reveal, leaving the blanks to be filled with speculation. Whatever story emerges between the lines can be made your own, allowing you to enjoy the genius of R, or V, (or the perfectly inoffensive visage of Meg Ryan), who might as well be whoever you want them to be.
– Dara Jochum
Samuel Haitz (*1997, Zurich, Switzerland) is an artist living and working between Berlin and Zurich. He studied at the University of the Arts Berlin (Meisterschüler, Class Josephine Pryde, 2023) and the Zurich University of Arts (Bachelor Fine Arts, 2020). His work has been shown in solo and duo exhibitions at Espace Topic (Geneva, 2024), Lokal-Int (Biel, 2024), HIT (Geneva, 2023, with Covey Gong), The Estate (Mesocco, 2023), All Stars (Lausanne, 2022, with Julie Beaufils) Sangt Hipolyt (Berlin, 2022), Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich, 2021) and Plymouth Rock (Zurich, 2019) and in several group exhibitions, for example at Etablissement d’en Face Brussels, 2024), Good or Trash (Paris, 2023), Galerie Lange + Pult (Auvernier, 2023), Helmhaus (Zurich, 2022), Museum für Fotografie (Berlin, 2022), Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, 2021), NEVVEN (Gothenburg, 2021) and MASI (Lugano, 2021) among others. He is part of the editorial team of the art magazine PROVENCE.
