Franky’s Theme

Peter Wächtler works in a variety of media: bronze, ceramics, drawings and video. But in many ways "stories" could be described as his main artistic material. His works often evoke a narration, with animals or human figures in animated states. They are made in ways that use and adapt elements of fiction and folklore, relating to specific traditions and common tales, and materialize the ways of telling a story as much as the story itself.

For his exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, Wächtler assembles a series of four distinct spaces, each presenting a group of new works (ceramics, bronze, drawings) leading towards the Kunsthall’s main space in which the video Untitled (Clouds) is projected. The piece features a lonely dragon with a straw hat gazing across a dried wasteland in front of colourful cloud formations. The silent images are overwritten by mid-screen subtitles, which report on considerations and reflections, using a language switching in-between associative poetry and an incoherent code with its true understanding long gone. We follow complaints, insecurities, hubris and self-questioning, while the creature, like many of Wächtler’s protagonists, keeps going. Sticking with the structural set-up of the Kunsthall and it seccesion of different sized galleries, the show's spectrum is broken up and bumpy, patching itself up from room to room. The four galleries, changing in modes and moods of production, display a stuttering and ambivalent relationship with progression, regression and the end.