Acacias 66

Renate Buser (Barmelweid, Aarau, 1961)
Commissioned by: Collection Pictet

The medium and subject of Renate Buser’s photographs is the urban and architectural fabric of the city. For her installations, she takes inspiration from existing elements in order to construct huge imaginary spaces, almost exclusively in black and white. Behind the windowless walls that she completely covers with printed tarpaulins, Buser’s photographs shape utopian spaces and open unusual points of view within the building’s landscape. The Collection Pictet commissioned Acacias 66 from the Swiss artist: a monumental image opens an urban perspective that is fantastical and realistic in equal measure. Views of Tokyo mix with images of architecture, some of which were taken in the nearby area. The façades of the bank rub shoulders with the dense architecture of the Nishi-Shinjuku district in Tokyo, to create the illusion of a city that lies somewhere between futurism and contemporaneity. Visible by all users of route des Acacias (a major road into and out of the city center), this impossible yet credible trompe-l’œil plays with the duplication of reality, substituting solids for voids and inside for outside, creating a fictional extension to the existing building.
Article commissioned by P3Art
Notice: Séverine Fromaigeat, translation: Matthew Cunningham

Links: www.p3art.ch