David Renggli – The Charm of Ignorance

As a child of postmodernism, Swiss artist DAvid Renggli interweaves popular culture and art-historical topoi with playful ease in his work to create a homogeneous whole. The starting point for this book is Renggli's exhibition ‘The Charm of Ignorance’ (2013) at the Bellpark Museum in Kriens. Renggli assembled around 2000 pictures in a rigid Petersburg hanging. The collages interweave opposites by drawing on images from fashion magazines and porn magazines, art catalogues and found photography. The viewer loses themselves in looking and falls into a trance-like state; the staging is a celebration of the creative act, which produces a vast number of individual works in a creative acceleration - the artist works on one picture for around three minutes. At first glance they seem familiar, but only on closer inspection does their surreal, grotesque absurdity reveal itself to the viewer - moments of surprise and redundancy as an aesthetic principle are recurring themes in Renggli's work and lead to a marvellous state of ambivalence that connects us with both sides of a problem, i.e. the both/and.