Annaïk Lou Pitteloud
Rational Intuition (2015)
Verstellbares Gerät
Variable Größen

Im Foyer des Kunstverein München.

A telescopic aluminium pole has two blocks of pressed pastel fixed at its extremities: a blue and a red one. This pole can be adjusted to the height of the exhibition space in order to create a diagonal where the blue end presses against the ceiling while the red end rests on the floor.

By holding the pole in the middle and turning it around its median axis, the two colour blocks simultaneously mark the opposite surfaces of the space, leaving ring-shaped traces on the bottom and top of the room. Once the markings have been made, the pole is put down on the floor, along a wall of the exhibition space.

This object functions as a tool designed to mark the space by ascribing two specific colours to opposing areas. As a result, it automatically positions the maker of these markings at the centre of a divided micro cosmos where the ceiling is marked blue and the floor is marked red. This function of demarcation implements a division of the space that creates antagonisic categories: blue versus red; up versus down.

Providing such categories with content necessitates the application of language, at first based on elemental contradictions such as: yes versus no; right versus wrong; good versus bad; high versus low; top versus bottom or, more symbolically, sky versus earth.

Yet these elemental antinomies suggest other, more specific ones: Space versus Time; Content versus Form; Result versus Process; Exhibition versus Studio; Work versus Idleness; Knowledge versus Ignorance; Complexity versus Simplicity; Seriousness versus Humour; Theory versus Practice; Rationality versus Intuition and so on.

As such, the use of this tool produces visual antinomies that generate language.
While these antinomies are often used as such to describe or qualify a work of art in the artistic discourse, they were part of a whole during the ongoing process that preceded the artwork.

This tool aims to be this paradox: when one makes something, the opposites convene; as soon as an artwork exists, linguistic contradictions appear.

The exhibition space is used as a blank page on which to doodle, with the awareness of thus producing an inescapable dialectic loop of which the markings are a result, but for which they simultaneously provide a model.

Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, born in Lausanne, CH, in 1980, lives and works between Belgium and Switzerland.

Her work makes use of different media to direct the viewer's attention to the invisible components of image-construction, the museum space, and the creative process itself. Pitteloud's pared-down vocabulary raises critical questions to do with social issues, while challenging the art world's mechanisms and its codes of perception, transmission and presentation.

From 2002 to 2005, Pitteloud studied at Bern University of the Arts (BUA), CH.
From 2010 to 2011, followed a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, NL.

Her work has been presented amongst others in Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne (2016), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2015), Museo cantonale d’Arte Lugano (2014), Kunsthalle Bern (2013), WiFe de With RoFerdam (2012), Moscow Biennale (2012), Shanghai Biennale (2012), and has been rewarded by different prizes (Swiss Art Awards 2006 and 2007, Prix culturel Vaudois 2008, Prix culturel Manor Vaud 2016).