David Fesl

David Fesl’s sculptural objects bear traces of his everyday life, turning the things he uses regularly into abstract biographical fragments. His precise assemblages, of the most diverse things of nature and everyday life are small in size, but in their balanced composition and play with our perceptions of scale and relation, certainly provide a more monumental evocation in their specific universal forms.

Like a jeweller, Fesl combines the organic and the inorganic, object and artifice, in a way that allows radically opposing elements to come together in a surreal yet harmonious way, until a new morphology emerges. A mucus shell and a scrunchie, a peach stone and an earring, an onion skin and a screw. In these sophisticated configurations, each individual part undergoes a metamorphosis in which one component emerges concisely: its shape, its colour, its texture. Few everyday objects retain their emblematic charge and recognisable functionality. In the fragile, almost ephemeral works, the associations triggered by the constituent objects and their narrative potential, precisely woven together, trace a constellation of experience and sensory arousal.

The gentle eroticism that characterises these works, suggests a space beyond fixed attribution: connotations remain variable, evading description, things appear both masculine and feminine. David Fesl frees what he seeks and finds from their preconceived limitations, transforming them into enigmatic forms amongst one another. In an almost painterly way, he infuses the work with his own hand. His sculptural compositions expose and transform the meanings of what constitutes them. Things, in a sense, become queer. In their amalgamation, which is also inherent in a great craftsmanship, something fascinatingly new emerges, which in its poetic as well as subtly identity-political visual language situates itself outside conventional categorisation. The decidedly white surrounding space that provides the framework adds an institutional-critical component to this language that underscores Fesl’s extraordinary positioning in the field of sculpture and incisive social analysis.

– Müller, Vanessa Joan. Paris: Paris Internationale, 2021 (exhibition text).