Artists: Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz
Exhibition title: Affinities
Venue: Weiss Falk, Basel, Switzerland
Date: April 13 – May 25, 2019
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Weiss Falk, Basel
The exhibition starts outside, from the street. The photographs (10 x 15 cm) are displayed on white slats in the window, an elongated showcase that shelters and shades the gallery interior from the incoming sunshine. The photos were all shot at the 20th edition of La Plaine, an independent carnival held outside the eponymous district of Marseilles owing to ongoing urban development work there.
We follow the „partygoers“ in their element till they melt into the crowd and into the imperturbable architecture of everyday life. Some of their eyes ex-press incredulity amid this multifarious mix of Marseillais. Ubiquitous reflec-tions of a thousand differences in distinct, even incompatible, parts of the city. We wanted to show them to passers-by in Basel, a city in which carnival is done differently. We took these reflections with us to serve as an introducti-on to the exhibition, as well as to pay tribute to a place, a moment, a multitude of friendships.
Inside the gallery we’ve hung a series of large-format pictures on the walls, oil paintings on paper mounted on wood, the fruits of our explorations and discoveries. Our motive was to paint anything but a painting, to work with a polychrome palette, to make a point. We confine ourselves to evoking forms without naming them: spheres, self-consuming planets, umpteenth gadgets, observant eyeballs, blindable eyewitnesses, all manner of projectiles that gou-ge whatever’s gougeable, a ginormous packed arena, a host of human skills and wills) – forms that may well be attributable to a general sense of the end of time/race/world. We ought to celebrate the potential disappearance of all these concepts, like switching on the lights at a show about the instantaneous extinction of a civilization. Affixing verbalized themes (maternal bonds, quar-rels over needs and desires, a patrol reporting irregularities, collective empha-sis) to this multitude of microcosms introduced us to the Paleozoic soul and then to the degenerate heart.
We have never shown abstract paintings before: shame on us for waiting so long – and shame on us for jumping on the bandwagon now!
It’s as though we’d resisted this temptation… until the door gave under the weight of insistent serendipity, until we found ourselves facing the music, fin-ding interest in the insipid.
Which inevitably brought us back to our human destinies, acceptance of the first signs of old age, death. This series of paintings – alchemical treatises – goes down the wrong tracks of eternal life, skillfully recycling shit and gold, the Way of the Cross illuminated by sodium-vapor and energy-intensive mer-cury bulbs.
The furniture designed for the occasion is made of recycled materials, improbable colors, roughly based on a rough idea one might have of an equally rough idea: that of a nation.
The drawings speak for themselves.
We’d like to thank everyone who helped us carry out these visual experiments in this climate of exceptional quality.
Basel, 2019
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Affinities, 2019, exhibition view, Weiss Falk, Basel
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Mobilier/Documentaire (Marseille-Carneval-‘19) I, 2019, Photographs, paper on cardboard, wood, 145 × 120 × 2.5 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Mobilier/Documentaire (Marseille-Carneval-‘19) II, 2019, Photographs, paper on cardboard, wood, 145 × 120 × 2.5 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Mobilier/Documentaire (Marseille-Carneval-‘19) III, 2019, Photographs, paper on cardboard, wood, 145 × 120 × 2.5 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Mobilier/Documentaire (Marseille-Carneval-‘19) IV, 2019, Photographs, paper on cardboard, wood, 145 × 120 × 2.5 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Technodromes I (Nous sommes nombreuses-eux), 2019, Oil and letraset on paper on wood, 192 × 142 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Technodromes II (Vos envies sont nos besoins), 2019, Oil and letraset on paper on wood, 192 × 142 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Technodromes III (Ça dit: Tout le monde c‘est bel et bien chacun), 2019, Oil and letraset on paper on wood, 192 × 142 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Technodromes IV (Possible infraction a hauteur d‘univers), 2019, Oil and letraset on paper on wood, 192 × 142 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Technodromes V (Un jour maman c‘est mère), 2019, Oil and letraset on paper on wood, 192 × 142 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Mobilier Pré-conçu (Îlot), 2019, Lacquer, wood and steel, 40 × 265 × 265 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Mobilier Pré-conçu (Banc), 2019, Lacquer, wood and steel, 40 × 258 × 57 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Mobilier Pré-conçu (Tabouret I), 2019, Lacquer, wood and steel, 40 × 56 × 56 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Mobilier Pré-conçu (Tabouret II), 2019, Lacquer, wood and steel, 40 × 56 × 56 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Public Illumination I, 2019, Oil on paper on wood, 207 × 136 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Public Illumination I, 2019, Oil on paper on wood, 207 × 136 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Public Illumination II, 2019, Oil on paper on wood, 207 × 136 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Public Illumination III, 2019, Oil on paper on wood, 207 × 136 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Public Illumination IV, 2019, Oil on paper on wood, 207 × 136 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Public Illumination V, 2019, Oil on paper on wood, 207 × 136 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Public Illumination VI, 2019, Oil on paper on wood, 207 × 136 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Public Illumination VII, 2019, Oil on paper on wood, 192 × 142 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Dennis Rodman‘s Case, 2019, China ink, pen and letraset on paper, 31 × 23 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Aux Générations successives, pareilles interrogations, 2019, China ink, pen and letraset on paper, 31 × 23 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Mon Amour Vieux. De mensonges, de l‘eternel, 2019, China ink, pen and letraset on paper, 31 × 23 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Moral im Hochschwarzwald, 2019, China ink, pen and letraset on paper, 31 × 23 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Since Life Kills, 2019, China ink, pen and letraset on paper, 31 × 23 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Invitations & Avertissements, 2019, China ink, pen and letraset on paper, 31 × 23 cm
Timothée Calame, Alan Schmalz, Where there are special things to do, 2019, China ink, pen and letraset on paper, 31 × 23 cm