Swiss artist Jean-Frédéric Schnyder’s favorite subject is his own homeland, but his view of it is slyly funny and free of idealization. Whether in the deadpan serial paintings for which he is best known, such as the 119 plein air images of the Geneva-Romanshorn highway that he presented at the 1993 Venice Biennale, or in his more recent photographic works, Schnyder comes across as more ironist than nationalist (something Switzerland has more than enough of these days). At Eva Presenhuber he presents a new series of panoramic photographs, all 2003; in each one, he has gathered a group of similar objects—cigarette packs, empty plastic bottles, sprigs of edelweiss—and arranged them in a precise row. Lined up like soldiers in front of a lush Alpine background, the indigenous wildflowers look as alien, and as alienated, as the consumerist detritus. In the same spirit of rigorous repetition, Schnyder meticulously photographed every single house on the road between the Swiss towns of Zug and Baar and then digitally spliced them together to form a single image (Zugerstrasse-Baarerstrasse, 1999–2000). The 47 1/2-foot-long C-print—here, broken into three parts—transcends its own banality through sheer repetition, achieving a kind of poetic tristesse.
Translated from German by Emily Speers Mears.
