Zoer - (FR)

Zoer, real name Frédéric Battle, painted cars, traffic jams and junkyards as a small child. In 2003, he started with graffiti and practised painting as a whole. Zoer was already a guest at Colab Gallery in 2017, for Prisma (then in a different constellation, Die_Cast), so SODA should remember this reunion well. It will be all the more exciting to be able to take an individual and new look at his work. Therefore: A hearty Bon Retour, Monsieur Zoer!

If you try to derive the German word Karosserie, which means wrack, you come across the French carrosse, the carriage. First basic structure as a means of transport. It can be traced back to antiquity. If we look at the artist's motifs, we repeatedly come across car bodies in different settings. However, these usually have more in common with the discarded shells of crustaceans or with fossil remains than with the showy version of an antique carriage. They often show the decay of a world that is evolving at an incredibly rapid pace, threatening to overtake itself. Depicted metamorphic processes accompany the examination of the theme of the outdated understanding of progress. The car as a moving fossil and as a witness to an already old world in which we find ourselves already and still. Back and forth, caught in the golden carriage of modernity.

»In the time when materials used in industry are considered recyclable, in the time of accelerated consumption and programmed obsolescence, the trained product designer paints the decay of man-made forms and materials. In a society defined by material possessions, what place and future do we give to physical objects? From portraits of objects to the question of traces, his work seeks to explore the inevitable reappearance of forms and materials. Through the depiction of wrecks, Zoer explores this initial state of transition and transformation. Through the prism of the automobile, which embodies the complexity of the twentieth century in both its technical constraints and its sociological implications, he recalls the last reflection of the past, which is fading very quickly. In painting, he interprets the romance of these spaces in the mutation in which objects are left between the hands of Providence; sheet metal becomes nature again; form becomes stroke and paint burns away. It is the delicate dramaturgy of the twilight of the objects that the artist expresses through a touch oscillating between speed and precision, accompanied by an intense and luminous colour palette. Zoer wants to preserve a trace of this industrial past, shaped around and by man.«