sleeper – Hot Air (Projet pour une idée)
6 Darnaway Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6BG. 0131 556 3662Hot Air (Projet pour une idée)
Summing up his own practice as ‘making nothing happen’, Pavel Büchler is committed to the catalytic nature of art its potential to draw attention to the obvious and revealing it as ultimately strange. Büchler’s work often references seminal works of modern art and literature. These references are never direct quotations, nor does the work rely solely on them. They are starting points from which imagination may proceed towards uncertain destinations.
sleeper will host Hot Air (Projet pour une idée). Here, Büchler acknowledges his debt to Marcel Broodthaers and simultaneously Broodthaers’ own fascination with René Magritte. He creates a simple cinematic effect; the hot air rising from a vintage slide projector placed in front of a screen illuminated by another projector appears animated like smoke. The image is as much an allusion to Magritte’s ‘pipe’ as it is an oblique reference to Broodthaers’ film Défense de Fumer and his passion for smoking (which Büchler, an unrepentant chain smoker, shares). Equally, the image can be a reminder of the 1970s’ pioneer of American experimental cinema, Hollis Frampton, who famously demonstrated the essence of cinema, ‘the rectangle of projected light’, by inserting a pipe cleaner into the gate of a projector.
Initiated by artist Alan Johnston and architect Neil Gillespie, sleeper brings to Edinburgh a rich diversity of national and international art from established and emerging artists. An archetypal white cube gallery, sleeper lends the viewer an intimacy with work in situation.