Peter Wächtler: Jolly Rogers

‘Jolly Rogers’ is a collection of Peter Wächtler’s latest short texts, written in preparation of his two solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall and Kunsthalle Zürich (both 2019), and combined with a nearly complete collection of the artist’s drawings and prints from recent years. The texts operate like vignettes to a larger story, and the images as unreliable illustrations to the narrative. However, the larger story never really is revealed. Each individual text, each single work, articulates itself by means of an intense focus. It is as if we were suspended in a continual zooming motion, as if the artist and author wanted to tell and show it all. But alas, such is life under the microscope: always larger-than-life, but at the wrong scale at a time driven by individual interests, self-optimization, and egos that stage themselves simultaneously as victims and disruptors.

Peter Wächtler works in a variety of media: bronze, ceramics, drawings and video. But in many ways “stories” could be described as his main artistic material. His works often evoke a narration, with animals or human figures in animated states. They are made in ways that use and adapt elements of fiction and folklore, relating to specific traditions and common tales, and materialize the ways of telling a story as much as the story itself.