Graf's work is an example of the synthesis of arts: it combines a large-scale spatial installation, interior design, photography. An architect by training, Graf has been working in other fields of art for a long time. Of particular importance for him as an artist, according to him, is the relationship between space and a person, the emotional and psychological impact that the interior has on the viewer.
The name, a play on words “Well, Come” means “okay, come in”: the author invites us to his home, saying “welcome” at the same time. It is not news that the temple has always been perceived as a kind of home, habitable space. The opportunity to use it for secular purposes is also not very fresh and goes back centuries if you think about concerts for parishioners. However, what will happen if a person takes over the church?
The twelve-meter structure, which meets the visitor right behind the church gates, has two goals: it visually destroys the usual space of the temple and, at the same time, supports and consolidates its structure. White tetrahedral in cross-section "beams" made of painted plywood resemble arrows pointing in opposite directions.
The artist "makes habitable" the church, "furnishing" the choir and chapels. In the apse, in place of the altar, there is a bed, in the chapels there is a carpet, a writing table, a sofa, a dressing table with a mirror, and framed photographs along the walls. But instead of profanation of the sacred or desecration of the shrine, the sacralization of the profane is obtained: the objects transferred here from the residential interior organically develop hierarchical relations with the space of the temple.
In the sink-font, burning candles are inserted instead of taps. The photographs are designed to intimate the space, give it a semblance, remind of the artist's existence and, at the same time, highlight his absence. This effect is well known to the guest, abandoned by the owners of the house for a few minutes, who, left to himself, wanders around the room and examines the evidence of someone else's life. In Graf's photographs, life is truly "alien", incomprehensible - alien objects in idyllic landscapes, upside-down buildings resembling UFOs, a tree without roots hanging over the lawn, the shadow of a small sprout on bare asphalt, "growing" above the shadow of a fence, torn out "with meat" a bell in one of the Brussels houses, a curved closed metal door with traces of vandalism.
On the back of the head of the bed, spray paint is inscribed with the inscription: STERBEN STREBEN (German for “die” and “strive, strive”). The word STERBEN is written "Leonardo" - mirror image, from right to left. From here, a general view of the interior of the temple opens with an installation: a white "arrow" pointing upwards corresponds to the word "strive", and the left, flatter one - to the word "die". The metaphor is, in essence, quite transparent, even banal, if we take these two words for verbs: our whole existence is described by them. However, the word STREBEN as a noun can mean "buttress" or "screed". If we take this into account, then the entire installation turns into a bracket that keeps the structure of the temple from destruction, that is, from death.
The artist's goal is to evoke existential feelings of the viewer: it is no longer so calm to rest on a bed with the word “death”. The same alarm is provoked by other objects: a bird's nest made of barbed wire (it is called "Cozy Beginning": how to sit in it ?!), a lifebuoy under one of the windows ("Decoration and Salvation": the church is like a home and like an ark!), an old clock with the word Mo (nu) ment on a pendulum, reminding of time, but not indicating it. As they study the exhibition, the viewer is immersed in the stream of their own associations, caused by all this abundance of metaphorical objects. And the idea itself as a whole demonstrates a literally understood metaphor of the church as at home - a kind of joke of an architect who confused contexts.
Florian Graf was born in Basel in 1980 and graduated from the Federal Higher Technical School in Zurich in 2005. Then he studied in London, Edinburgh and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lives and works in Basel, London and Berlin.
The Belleley Abbey complex has existed since the 12th century. and is located in the town of the same name in the Swiss Jura mountains. Since the end of the 19th century. it was turned into a psychiatric hospital, with the exception of a church built there in the early 18th century. designed by the famous Viennese architect Franz Beer. He has been organizing art exhibitions there since the 1970s. Bellelay Abbey Foundation (Stiftung Abtei Bellelay).
