Nicolas Feldmeyer

Fading Light

28 May - 05 August

Empty Pool

Nicolas Feldmeyer, Empty Pool, 3D Digital Rendering, 2020

Encounter is pleased to present ‘Fading Light,’ our first solo presentation of Nicolas Feldmeyer (Switzerland, 1980). Feldmeyer’s images sit on an unstable edge between the remembered and the forgotten, the familiar and the fictitious. Whilst many of the works included were conceived prior to the Covid 19 crisis, when viewed from our current standpoint Feldmeyer’s melancholic empty landscapes, surreal time-lapsed films and digital constructions take on a new prescience. It is no surprise therefore that one of Feldmeyer’s ‘Archway’ series was quickly selected by the Culture Department of the Swiss Embassy and physically circulated as a postcard to 26,000 Swiss Citizens in the UK as part of their efforts to keep connected during the crisis.

Preoccupied with ‘the experience of places and spaces in dreams’ Feldmeyer painstakingly creates imagined landscapes that do not exist in the ‘real’ world.  These places are not derived from photographs but are instead digitally constructed three dimensional models which occupy an new virtual space somewhere between painting and architecture. As Feldmeyer says ‘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 his ‘Estate’ series semi tangible details, such as the netting of a basketball hoop, fade into darkness and merge with more illusionary visual suggestions, creating an altogether disorientating effect. In his new ‘Archway’ series, imposing architectural structures overlap with expansive images reminiscent of Swiss mountainscapes, setting compositional stages from which the images can perform their subtle poetry. Feldmeyer examines and redevelops the Renaissance tradition of paintings within paintings, creating minute landscapes that operate as windows onto his own imagination.

For ‘Fading Light’, Feldmeyer has created a digital installation ‘Empty Pool’ (view above) a landscape which viewers can stand in themselves and look around. The place is one which Feldmeyer vaguely remembers from childhood and the process of encountering the work perhaps echoes the artist’s own process of recollection. The gaps and blind spots in the work become as important as what is constructed. A hazy light permeates through the scene, our view erratically jumps as we try and settle and get our bearings, the eye continuously slips between specific details and blurred empty spaces. Feldmeyer elucidates the slippage between past and present. We are provided access to look into the space but quickly become aware that we cannot fully investigate it or look beyond the horizon.

The show also includes a rare opportunity to view ‘Breaking Point’ 2012 a film created in the year that Feldmeyer won Saatchi Gallery New Sensations. The scale of his ‘Estates’ works reference his ongoing postcard collage series several works from which entered The British Museum’s permanent collection last year. For this exhibition Feldmeyer has also created ‘Obersee’, a limited-edition work for £250 from which all sales proceeds will go to the charity Mind whose work on mental health will become ever important in the aftermath of the crisis.

Conversation Series

Nicolas Feldmeyer Imagined Landscapes

Archways

Obersee

About Mind

Estates

View Framed

Breaking Point

NICOLAS FELDMEYER

Nicolas K Feldmeyer was born 1980 in Switzerland. 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 exhibited at galleries and institutions internationally including; Photographer’s Gallery, Flowers Gallery, China Academy of Art, Maddox Arts, MC2 Gallery, UCL Art Museum, Angus Hughes, Griffin Gallery, Onassis Cultural Centre. His work has been reviewed in The Times, Sunday Times, Art Monthly and published extensively. 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 British Museum, UCL Art Museum, British Land and The Leslie Collection.