Imagined Landscapes

Nicolas Feldmeyer In conversation with Alexander Caspari

In 2012 you won Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4's New Sensations which was an impressive achievement for an artist at an early stage in their career. Could you discuss the work or series of work that won the prize? How did it come about and do you feel it laid foundations for creative projects which have followed?

Thank you. Yes, it was a process in three rounds. First I applied with a portfolio of five works, including postcard collages, a digitally rendered landscape image and installations (one installation was in the Crypt of Christ Church Spitalfields and the other one was for the Portico of UCL, ‘Woven Portico’ I did for my degree show). Then I got shortlisted, and then selected as one of the four finalists. We were given some time and a budget at that point to realise a work specifically for the final exhibition. My proposal stated that I intended to make more 3D renderings, but in the end I changed my mind and created 4 video pieces. In the Jury were, amongst others, two of my favourite artists: John Stezaker and Richard Wilson, and that made me very proud, even though I don’t know of course what they thought personally. 

Prior to undertaking an MFA at Slade School of Fine Art and studying at San Francisco Fine Art Institute you actually completed an MSC in Architecture from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Could you discuss how you feel developing this architectural language has influenced your current practice? In particular could you discuss processes of making and ways of seeing?

I feel like the fish asked about water! Studying architecture at ETH for almost 6 years has not only influenced me, but probably transformed me so much that it’s hard for me to see where this influence begins and where it stops. It’s often other people that make me aware of it, how much I relate art to space, how much I work with measurement, structures and numbers, or how organised my filing system is! I guess most of the material I work with as an artist I developed there at architecture school: space, light, geometry. I always had a foible for the images of architecture, I think I got more out of the images than the actual built things. Afterwards I went for a career where I could study those things for their poetic potential only, instead of the whole complex responsibilities of an architect. It’s also difficult to pinpoint what I learnt, because I had various teachers with very different perspectives. With Elia Zenghelis we were studying utopian architecture, the ‘rhetoric’ power of architectural images for example, with Peter Markli I discovered a quasi-mystical devotion to beauty and mathematical proportions. I worked in his practice for a while afterwards, and I remember being invited to stare at simple line drawings with minute differences for a long time, until we could ‘see’ which one was ‘not so bad’. There is, broadly speaking, an affinity for minimalism at the ETH, that definitely influenced me. It has roots in 60s Minimalism, but also much deeper ones in an ideal of purity, maybe linked to Protestant ethics (The ETH is in Zurich, a bastion of the Reformation). What also sprang from Protestant morals are work ethics, and I even though I resented learning to work hard at first, I find myself grateful for it on a daily basis now. The whole school there is based in a tradition of modernism, influenced by Bauhaus. There is something, I’m not quite sure how to put it, that you can think in form, through form, you build, cut, paste, model, draw, as a way of thinking, you can conceptually make forms, not by talking cleverly about them, but in the form itself, by experimenting, experimenting, experimenting. I think this kind of ‘embodied’ thinking was a real gift.

You are very well known for your digital practice and in particular your striking Even After All series of digitally constructed landscapes. What was the concept behind this body of work and how did it come about?

There was always something with landscapes for me, an affinity that I can’t explain, but for some reason I couldn’t just make landscape images. This series of work brought together my love for romantic paintings (sublime) as well as land art, my architectural background and my native Swiss mountains. It felt like so many things were coming together. The rendering technique came about by accident so to say, or even with reluctance from my part (like so many of the best things in my life!). To support myself I had been doing architectural illustrations for different offices in Switzerland and London for years, and even though I quite enjoyed the process of creating invented worlds for others, I considered this work ‘alimentaire’ and thus less worthy. Yet while I was studying at the Slade (also paying for my studies with the said renderings) it became obvious to me that there was this tool full of endless possibilities, with a certain amount of craftsmanship I had developed, and therefore why not try to make some art with it?

Following on from the landscapes of Even After All most recently you have created a series of work entitled Estates which are entirely digitally imagined. These works seem to operate on the periphery between painting, photography and drawing. We have often spoken about the tension in these works between the imagined and the remembered, reality and fiction. Could you offer some further thoughts on this?

I am fascinated by the process of reconstructing in great detail small everyday moments - the evening sun on a brick courtyard, or the trees at the end of the park, familiar scenes that seem to say something very clear to me, although I never know exactly what. In this time of extremely quick proliferation of images I find something interesting in the slowness of this process of making. I construct the images little by little, over months, choosing the position of every element, materials, the light, the clouds, particles in the air.

I read a quote by Jeff Wall once that said that when he sees something that catches his attention, he starts by not taking a picture. A lot of the inspiration for these series comes from walking around where I live in Hackney. Since becoming a father, I find myself walking around a lot again. I used to do it when I was a student, but later convinced myself that I was too busy. In my surroundings I noticed what moved me in the works of great painters and architects, I recognised it sometimes in the modernist estates’ blank walls, in small empty parks, in small forgotten corners. I took hundreds of pictures of these small moments, but as much as that collection seemed precious, the photos didn’t seem to be the end. Only when I started constructing places from scratch did it work. So walking around I stop sometimes and sketch some rough composition or some details or take a picture. But the places I build in the end to make my images don’t exist, they are composed in my head and through drawings. And strangely enough, another thing that happened since being a father is that I started to make work in colour.

One theme that seems to run through your diverse practice is an interrogation of issues of scale. The work shifts back and forth from the minute to the monumental, the abstract to the specific. Traditionally scale is measured in relation to the human body yet many of your works are devoid of bodies. This on occasion creates quite a disorientating effect. Could you perhaps discuss this in more detail?

This is a very interesting point you’re making with the relationship of space and the body. And also revealing, since my relationship to architecture happens a lot through images (as I mentioned above, even some of my physical installation tend towards an image-like quality). What you mention with disorientation might follow from what I mention before with ‘dematerialization’, to put it simply, that the space in which your feet are standing, in which your body operates, also evokes something that only the mind can access. It also reminds me of the experience of spaces and landscapes in dreams.

Several of your postcard collages were collected by critic and curator Jeremy Cooper and recently gifted to The British Museum. I am interested the issues these works raise surrounding the role of the archive. For every postcard selected another is left behind - even the creative process of ripping and overlaying raises interesting issues in relation to history and memory. How do you select the postcards which you use in your works?

I have a box full of hundreds of old postcards in my studio, just loose, not archived in any particular order. When I make new collages, I open the box and take them out at random, until my desk is covered in postcards. It’s quite a different way of working to some other projects. I work very fast, and have to stop thinking so to say, just let the images suggest combinations, and follow. It’s very instinctive. For the collages so far, I like to simply use two postcards and combine them, creating new spaces, plausible contradictions, sometimes like metaphors or oxymorons in language, something that evokes or echoes something I seem to recognise but couldn’t name. I don’t know what I am looking for when I start. I also have to find matching colours, so that the two postcards blend well. I worked a lot with black and white postcards, but there are so many different ‘colours’ of black and white, all variations of sepia, more or less faded, more or less green or yellow. And the various papers and printing processes make some very shiny while others are ‘papery’, and so on… then I glue the ones that ‘worked’, often crop them again to reframe the image, and leave them around in the studio until I know which one are more successful, and I discard the other collages. What ‘working’ for an image means is a mystery to me.

You lecture on drawing at Camberwell College of Arts and alongside your digital renderings and postcard collages you have created a wonderful series of works on paper in ink, graphite, chalk etc. Could you speak a little about the diversity of your drawing practice? In particular how you experiment with the boundaries of the medium to create such sensitive impressions.

Before answering the question about my own drawing practice, I have to emphasise that the understanding of ‘drawing’ on the BA Fine Art Drawing at Camberwell College is what I would call extended. When I interviewed for the job, the fact that work with 3D digital drawings and on land art and public art commissions seemed as interesting to the course leader (Kelly Chorpening at the time) than the fact that I do indeed make drawings as finished works. What is crucial, for me and for the students, is that drawing is the common denominator of (almost) all art practices, the tool we go back to when we’re stuck, the medium through which to investigate things. A moto for the course is ‘thinking through drawing’. On the course we are as interested in musical and dance notations as life drawing, in architectural blueprints and anatomical depictions as well as old master sketches. Between traditional discipline-based courses (painting, sculpture, …) and completely medium-less courses, legacy of the 70s conceptual movements, this course has an interesting place I find, anchoring the student search in a practice that is both the oldest of all disciplines and yet not a canonically defined one. I hope you’ll excuse the parentheses, but it is important to me as an artist as well as a teacher: most of my work relies on drawing, whether the final product be one or not.

As to the actual drawings as finished artworks I make, they have a strong relationship to the installations and other images. I was experimenting with layering of translucent ink washes for example at the same time than planning an installation with a series of thin veils in a disused factory, or one with tracing paper sheets. I experimented with textures and atmosphere in small landscape pictures of a backyard first through a series of pastel drawings before using some of the same devices in a 3D constructed work. And the ‘sillages’ series (line drawings) came to be at the same time that I was ‘drawing a line’ in a landscape with dozens of timber posts.

Alongside your temporary public installations in recent years you have started creating permanent public works in the UK and internationally. Most recently you are working on a project in Zurich entitled ‘Rosengarten’ what is this project and what are your plans for it?

I am very excited about this project – it is on site at the moment, having started only a few weeks ago. The competition for which I presented the project took place 4 years
ago, so it is wonderful to see the project materialize after all these years. This is a permanent public art project (Kunst und Bau) for a new student housing complex in Zurich, Switzerland. There is a rule in Switzerland that for all new public buildings or buildings on public land like this one), 1% of the budget goes to the creation of artworks integrated to the building. The architects (Atelier Scheidegger Keller) designed a building with a lot of exposed concrete surfaces – all floors as well as some ceilings and walls. The site is next to a road called ‘Rosengartenstrasse’. It refers to a long extinct rose garden, and the road today is a heavy carriageway with dense commuter traffic. Inspired by the name of the place, and incidentally a poem by T.S. Eliot mentioning concrete and a rose garden together, my idea was to polish some of the concrete floors in the communal living rooms according to historical rose garden patterns. There are 18 flats in the building, each one with a generous, double-height living room, and so each flat gets a unique pattern, each referring to a historical rose garden, from Eyrignac in France to Samarkand in Uzbekistan. I was fascinated by the idea that the artwork does not add any material to the building, but rather removes some by polishing certain surfaces of the existing concrete floors. In doing that, it reveals the textural quality of the material, and also creates new reflections and light plays inside the flats. Classical rose garden designs are often concentric, which plays well into the idea of the living room as central point of the student communal life. Beyond the simple idea, the realization proved much more difficult, and several life-size tests over years with specialist companies in Zurich were necessary. I have recently received the first pictures [I cannot travel to the site anymore due to the C-19 lockdown], and they look very promising.

Nicolas Feldmeyer

Nicolas Feldmeyer (1980) was born in Switzerland and lives and works in London. After completing an MSc in Architecture in Zurich he went on to study Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute on a Fulbright Grant. Feldmeyer received an MFA with distinction from the Slade in 2012. His work has been awarded the Saatchi and Channel 4’s New Sensations First Prize 2012 and the William Coldstream Prize amongst others.

Feldmeyer has regularly exhibited at important galleries and institutions internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Terrain Vague’, Encounter, Lisbon (2023), ‘Fading Light’, Encounter, Online (2020), ‘Beacon’, Hammersmith and Fulham Townhall, London (2018), ‘Towards the Horizon’, Fano Island, Denmark (2016), ‘Lacunae’, Lacuna Project Space, London (2015), ‘Subliminal Spaces’, Maddox Arts, London (2015), ‘Nicolas Feldmeyer’, MC2 Gallery, Milan (2014), ‘Untitled (Crypt)’, Christchurch Spitalfields London (2011). Selected group exhibitions include; ‘RSA Annual Exhibition’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2022), ‘Fermata’, Encounter, London (2021), ‘What Remains’, Encounter, London (2021), ‘Drawing Postal Project, Camberwell College, London (2021), ‘Photo London’, Encounter, Online (2020), ‘Shapes in Clouds’, Encounter, London (2020), ‘Everything Must Go’, Assembly Point, London (2019), ‘Photographs’, Sotheby’s, London (2019), ‘Border Lines’, Maddox Arts, London (2019), ‘5 Trillion Times’, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (2018), ‘Aesthetica Art Prize’, York Art Museum, York (2018), ‘Art of the Postcard’, Handel Street Projects, London (2017), ‘No Lemon, No Melon’ Flowers Gallery, New York (2017), Artist Rooms, Encounter, London (2017), ‘Right Through You’, Koppel Project, London (2017), ‘Perfectionism’, Griffin Gallery, London (2015), ‘Lumen Prize’, New York Institute of Technology, New York (2014), ‘Hacking Spaces’, Bosse and Baum, London (2014), ‘Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed’, The Photographers Gallery, London (2013), ‘Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4 New Sensations’, Victoria House, London (2012). Feldmeyer is a guest lecturer at the AA School of Architecture, The CASS, Metropolitan University, and is Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College, University of the Arts London. His work is included in numerous public and private collections worldwide including The Victoria and Albert Museum, The British Museum, UCL Art Museum, Panoptes Collection, Sellar Property and British Land and MACAM Museu de Arte Contemporânea Armando Martins.