" Gabriella Gerosa (1964) lives and works in Basel and Berlin. Her artistic oeuvre has greatly influenced the Swiss video art scene. Numerous highly acclaimed exhibitions in Switzerland, France, Germany and Austria. Works in private and public collections. Three-time winner of the annual Swiss Federal Fine Arts Award by the Federal Office of cultural Affairs. "

.

Still lifes of an omnipotent nature - copied from reality

Gabriella Gerosa is a hunter, perhaps a gatherer, who stalks her images with unfailing instinct. She has made it her business to capture the very moment to witch temporality has been reduced. Gerosa contrasts the real time and speed of video technology with a painstaking slowness; she unswervingly and patiently waits for that moment-magnified time. But this is a pleasurable lying-in-wait, and it is full of perceptible joy.

The situations produced in her images take a long time to mature. Once the tension has reached the pitch at which a sketch may be produced, she proceeds to complete outlines with the evocative locations, objects and characters that give the image its palpable form. As in a lab experiment she prepares her set with great care, arranging her tableau with attention to even the most minute detail.

Because she considers cropping and subsequent editing as non-real, as too distant from reality, it is only at this point that Gerosa allows herself some manipulations and artistic inerventions. However, the camera must not be shifted one iota from ist location. This is how her scenes become traps, actual image traps to perhaps capture a small piece of reality.

An eery atmosphere suffuses Die Blütenstaubfresserin II (The Pollen Eater II, 2001): a woman absent-mindedly-with a repetitive monotony that may strike us as absurd-picks at a rose blossom which resembles a piece of textile handicraft. The woman is sitting in a tiny room full of cascades of rose blossoms. It seems to belong to a different era, a room or a study done in the style of the Old Masters. A heavily symbolic genre tableau-erotic sacred, with a hint of witchcraft, perhaps-emerges from the combination of contrasting topoi, i.e. the Madonna im Rosenhag (a.k.a. Virgin in the Rosebush) and the noble but beguilling Medieval Damsel with a Rose. What is most striking about this video-painting, however, is the seemingly tangible moment of arrested time, of stilled evanescence. As in Vermeer, this hyper-presence suddenly veers into a transitoriness witch it isalmost impossible to express.

The piece Julchen (2004, from the video cycle The House Behind the Poplar Trees. Apple blossom garden) also shows such a young girl who, lost to the world-cradles an apple in her innocent, warm, caressing hands. The ambiguous connotation of the fruit-paradise and sin-produces a subtle subversion of the apparent pastoral.

Like an opulent 17 th century Dutch still life, Buffetcrash (2003, from the video cycle "Das Fest" the Feast) celebrates the beauty of the material world. The richly laid table presents itself to the viewer in a recreation of the baroque notion of luxury, promising a surfeit of lust and pleasure.
It is a moment ot overwhelming opulence whose outward appearance will shortly be smashed by a chandelier above the scene. With almost malicious relish the artist plays on the contrast between mundane pomp and the archetypal aesthetic ot each object caught in an unexpected wave of destruction: blossoms zooming through the air, crystal glasses breaking, bottles exploding-while the bread basket moves sluggishly and the regal lobster is quite still in this impressive painterly battle.

Päonien (Peonies, 2005) likewise celebrates transitoriness. Its structure again is a conscious reference to the Old Dutch still life tradition; the opulent Old-Masterly frame converts this video Into what appears to be a perfect painting. Sublediscrepancies ensure the lasting effect of this visual experience. In a subversion of the painterly tradition, it is not an opulent crystal vase but a crudely cut plastic bottle which reflects the bright lateral light to illuminate the dark background. Nor is it the gloryof the blossoming flower, but the wilting petals of a peony that remind the viewer of the vanity of life.

The artist is fascinated by the aesthetic nature of bygone things. Mercilessly, she waits for the moment at which the flower dies under her eyes, shedding its withered petals. It is an almost unbearable silence that residesinthese images, a silence that dissolves in complex ways as the Petals drift down-singly, in pairs or in a cluster. Each flower dies its very own death, but each one wrests a brief moment of beauty from omnipotent nature.

Oliver Wick