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PARADISELOST

G

Two decades in, Mathias Kessler’s wanderlusting quest

for the sublime in a virtual reality world is just getting started.

BY MICHAEL SLENSKE PORTRAIT BY CHRISTIAN ANWANDER

rowing up in the tiny village of Riezlern,overlooking the Austrian ski valley of Kleinwalsertal, apene-enclave only accessible by car through thesouthern border of Germany, Mathias Kessler wasborn into mountaineering and photography. Hisgrandfather started a ski club in 1906 and a photolab the following year. After World War II, his uncle andfather were involved in building a cable car beside thefamily’s mountainside home, which made it possiblefor the popular Fellhorn/Kanzelwand ski resort to getoff the ground. Around that time they also beganexpanding the lab into a postcard business that endedup providing archival images of the resort. In otherwords, by the time Kessler was a teenager, he waswell-versed in the “dysfunction between the image weuse for advertising and the reality we create,” he says.“There were all these staging moments in tourism thatsort of found me and made an impression on me. Itwasn’t just the ski lifts or people coming down theslope in the middle of the night with lights, there wasalways a show with people being daredevils andjumping and almost killing themselves. All thesetourists were seeing how fantastic it was, but I would

look at those people and say, ‘You only see half of it.’You talk about Michael Heizer or Robert Smithson.Every summer I saw whole mountains being movedto make new space for the ski lift and downhill piste.”

These early impressions—and his growingfascination with image culture—laid a foundation foran art practice that melds adventure travel tours andsteroidal nature photography, virtual reality-derivedlandscapes and immersive living environments, orbeer-fueled happenings and gradient-sprayed fossilsculptures.

“I feel like nature has become virtual reality, andit’s a camouflage,” says Kessler. “Even my socialmedia is a camouflage. I’m posting images that mayor may not be related to myself. I think the same istrue for the natural world. We sort of project ournatural desires into it.”

Kessler’s fascination with the increasingly violentintersections of the man-made and natural worldstook root in Austria but was solidified after a series oftrips down the Amazon in a dugout canoe with abuddy in the early nineties. “Every time I went back Irealized the Amazon was getting smaller and smaller

and more people were moving in, so there was thissensation that we were everywhere,” says Kessler,who worked as a commercial photographer in Linzand Vienna until he moved to New York in the latenineties, where he shot campaigns for top brands(Nike), magazines (GQ) and newspapers (The NewYork Times). All the while he was building up the bodyof work that launched his artistic career: 0 Gravity, aseries of portraits of obese New Yorkers submergedin tanks filled with rice pudding.

“They were kind of examinations of body andflesh in a post-consumer apocalypse,” says Kessler,who got a huge response from his 2000 debut at NewYork’s Rare Gallery followed by a series of museumexhibitions across Europe. “I realized that the biologyand landscape of the body is so connected with howhumans shape the world, from a body of consumedfat to a destroyed landscape.”

This led Kessler to set out on a series of explorationsbetween 2003 and 2009 to capture the quintessentialnight landscape in the tradition of Ansel Adams. Hetraveled to dozens of countries, notably capturing theranges of locations such as Parque La Huasteca in

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Monterrey, Mexico, his hometown of Kleinwalsertal andthe Gran Sabana of Bolívar, Venezuela.

“Ansel Adams was adding to the idea of theromantic landscape from the 19th century bycapturing the places we decided to leave untouched,”says Kessler, who took cues from the strip mines hediscovered in Venezuela to investigate those in ruralWest Virginia in a series of aerial photos, which hewould later print and wallpaper in geometricconfigurations on the walls of Frankfurt’s GalerieHeike Strelow, Austria’s Kunsthaus Graz and theAustrian Cultural Forum in New York. “I think that bydesign we kill the landscape and we kill the wholeworld down the road,” says Kessler. “It’s just asymptom of the fever and the fever is spreadingthroughout the world.”

Though the artist has mounted expeditions tomore than 50 countries in his 48 years—be itshipwreck diving off Cuba, hiking across the desertsof La Paz or scouting icebergs with movie lights inpitch black, 40 below zero winter days and nights inGreenland’s Disko Bay—the financial, emotional andphysical costs have taken their toll. “I’ve learned fromexperience that people will freak out on me to thepoint of threatening me,” says Kessler of his larger-scale productions, noting that the cold and darknessin Greenland caused his collaborators to “really losetheir minds.”

As a result, he’s been moving away fromcapturing images of the natural world to recreatingexperiences of it. The works—some permanent, someephemeral, many of which are actually alive—showthe fragility of our relationship to nature in this over-

mediated, hyper-connected world. They includeguided boat tours of the Danube River, Icelandic fjordsor the East River with friends which he records withline drawings; simulated environments of Antarcticadventures complete with engine oil fragrances andrefreezing mirrors; a photographed virtual realityrendering of Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic seascape,The Sea of Ice; billboards with photos of computer-generated sunset simulacra; or Nowhere to Be Found,a modernist fish tank (not unlike Jeff Koons’s One BallTotal Equilibrium Tank) filled with a human skullovergrown with coral that can feed off the bonecalcium for two decades.

Independent curator Dieter Buchhart, whoassembled the recent “Schwitters Miró Arp” survey atHauser Wirth & Schimmel, showed Nowhere to Be

Found alongside works by Joseph Beuys, FelixGonzalez-Torres and Warhol in a 2012 group show,“The Nature of Disappearance,” at Marianne BoeskyGallery. “It was one of the most impressive pieces inthe show,” says Buchhart. “It was very specialbecause it incorporated the aspects of science,climate change, exploration and vanitas, and itworked with chemical processes so you could also callit a memento mori. What Mathias does is make youactively part of the process even though you won’t seeanything happen while you’re looking at it—you’ll seeit after three months or three years.”

In addition to welcoming his first child, Kessler’sattentions of late have been focused on expandingtwo strains of his practice: living environments thatinclude everything from butterfly habitats to acrobaticpole dancers and minimalist sculptures hewn from

slabs of marble (or Mesozoic fossils) with digitally-rendered sunset gradients applied with spray paint. “Ioften refer to art history as this Photoshop layer thatjust gets flattened,” says Kessler. “Marble is arthistory, but then you have this minimal gradient that’skind of a sunset and kind of a landscape, but it alsocomes out of a virtual reality because it’s producedon Illustrator and then spray-painted. It’s like aPhotoshop layer where you press flatten and itcompresses everything.”

These flattened works have recently materializedalongside Camille Henrot, Adrián Villar-Rojas andRachel Rose at “The Home Show” the acclaimedmicro-survey inside the Manhattan apartment of artistand producer Asad Raza; at Site:Lab for the 2016 ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan; and in a recent groupshow with Catherine Opie, Tacita Dean and JohnDivola about the sun as a photographic subject at theColumbus Museum of Art. “Mathias is one of theartists I know who is always exploring this thresholdbetween human perception and non-human worlds,environments, organisms and processes,” says Raza.“He comes from outside the Marian Goodman,Chantal Crousel and Kurimanzutto world, but maybenot for too much longer.” The full range of thisperception-bending oeuvre is currently on display in amultimedia mid-career survey at the Boulder Museumof Contemporary Art through May 29.

“A lot of artists are seeking the surface, whileMathias is searching for the stuff below,” saysBuchhart. “He creates something new with histableaux vivants. Even if there are no people in it, it’skind of a living image.”

“I think that by design we kill the landscape and we kill the whole

world down the road. It’s just a symptom of the fever and the

fever is spreading throughout the world.” —Mathias Kessler

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Mathias Kessler’s Nowhere to Be Found