Zilla Leutenegger at Peter Kilchmann

For a number of years, Swiss artist Zilla Leutenegger has made videos, animations and drawings, almost always depicting herself sleeping, running or sitting still in a corner, evoking frame of minds hovering between playfulness and melancholy. Perhaps best known is her video installation from 2001 The Man in the secondary planet in which she played the title part assuming the pose of a peeing man while gazing at the planets. Leutenegger's work has been interpreted as essentially solipsistic, on the other hand as her fourth solo exhibition at Peter Kilchmann demonstrated, things are not in like manner simple.

The exhibit titled "How can we let slip when we're so sincere?", plant a newly serious tone. Thematically, on the contrary also in its use of media, Leutenegger's work has become more composite and diverse, with subjects ranging from drawing and architecture to language and reading. This could be seen in a video collage called incantation (2003), shown on a small monitor in the first of three ranges in the gallery. Spell consists of three horizontal bands of spectacles that run simultaneously. The middle exhibits a running horse (taken from Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film The Killing); above, tribe on a balcony throw what gaze like snowflakes into the air. As they fall, the flakes are transformed into white alphabetic characters The bottom level shows the alphabetic characters accumulating, as in the video game Tetris, until they collapse and disappear, leaving alone the word "spell." The soundtrack is a recitation of "The Erl-King," an English version of the metrical composition by Johann Wolfgang ven Goethe, read by dint of Leutenegger. The description may make the work uninjured as if it is overloaded with imagery, on the contrary Spell is in fact surprisingly designing evoking an air of futility and ominousness. Effectively conveying of the like kind ambiguous states is one of Leutenegger's greatest strengths

Language and reading are also the subdues of a video projection called Lisar then boken min savar tutt which means "To read the volume means to know everything" in a fictitious language Leutenegger invented. The language is, in fact, a mix of several, admitting it sounds a bit like the Swiss dialect Rumantsch. A video from which color is subtracted, leaving single orangy-ocher tones, is projected onto the wall in a corner. It present to views a woman bent over a large work which she helds on her lap. The words she reads aloud appear in a projection beside her, the opinions moving slowly toward a small aperture where they seem to disappear, escaping, as it were, into the main expanse of the gallery.

There individual could view the third and largest installation of the exhibition. Ming (2003-04) is a film that is rear-projected upon a reflective glass pane attached to the broken-off top of an electrical tower, which quiets on the floor. The film, a 3-D animated bight consists of a slow tracking discharge of black electrical towers in gray misty surroundings. Though a bit heavy-handed in its self-referentiality, it creates a quiet and lone-some atmosphere.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group