source: camdenartscentreorg

Camden Arts Centre presents the first solo show in the UK by Swiss artist Raphael Hefti. For the past ten years he has been interfering with material processes, manipulating and transforming substances to create surprising images and objects. Coming from a technical background with a keen interest in how things are made and what things can do, Hefti sets up pseudo scientific experiments which challenge industrial fabricators and ultimately divert objects from their original state. This exhibition will approach his investigations from a specific tangent: discovering mistakes in industrial processes and pushing them to a limit where aesthetic transformations take place, where accidents are seen as productive forces.

Subtraction as Addition is a work that comes out of the Luxar coating process, which produces ‘museumglass’. The process of vaporising specific metals and bonding them to the surface of glass with a high voltage current in a vacuum container eliminates reflection for exhibition purposes. Exaggerating an accidental discovery inherent in the repetition of this process, the large sheets of glass evolve with variable optical behaviour that will change with the ambient light in the gallery. Replaying the Mistake of a Broken Hammer similarly subverts the function of an industrial process, resulting in an aesthetic transformation. A steel rod is subjected to a hardening technique, that is interrupted leaving part of its extension extremely brittle and vulnerable; the resulting gradations of colour and texture testify to this otherwise unknown condition. Lycopodium is a series of large format black & white and colour photograms, creating ambiguous images by burning the spores of the Lycopodium plant on photosensitive paper.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: theguardian

Swiss artist who pushes industrial processes to breaking point, conjuring dazzling mirrors out of museum glass and rainbow moonscapes out of burning plant spores. Born in 1978, Hefti started out as an apprentice specialising in electronics, before studying industrial design, photography and art. It was during his long sessions experimenting in the workshop that he developed a fascination for mechanical processes – particularly the amazing things that can happen when stuff goes wrong. His Damascene moment came when he saw a steel hammer break like a vase when it was accidently dropped in the brittle phase between two heating stages. While this event clearly had no place in the workaday world, it was something he could embrace as an artist. In 2010, he looked back to that workshop smash and created the first of his brittle steel bars, Replaying the Mistake of a Broken Hammer.

Hefti often works with factory craftspeople to divert things from their normal functions. In his current London solo debut, Launching Rockets Never Gets Old, giant panes of museum glass are propped against the walls of an airy gallery like magic mirrors. Instead of providing an invisible barrier between the public and the precious objects held in display cases, Hefti’s glass is vividly coloured in hues of deep pink, blue and gold. It’s a gorgeous effect created by amplifying the very process that normally makes the glass less noticeable: anti-reflective coating which the artist has had applied in many layers. Thinking far, far outside the box, he disrupts production line logic to create dazzling artistic feats.