There is always more than meets the eye in the work of the artist duo Linus Bill + Adrien Horni (both b. 1982, CH). What is seemingly a conventionally looking abstract painting bears extensive processes of transformation, revaluation, and experimentation that subvert painting itself. Despite their appearance, it could be argued that their works resemble paintings, yet they are not. Rather, they are images in perpetual modification which, among different processes, have been painted on. As a matter of fact, Linus Bill + Adrien Horni do not consider themselves painters: Bill studied photography, while Horni is trained a graphic designer. Nonetheless, they chose painting as their medium since they first started working together in 2011. In their continuous quest to repurpose and expand their work, Midlife Painting is the result of an intuitive revaluation of existing images in which the circumstance of failure leads to success.
For their solo presentation at the gallery, the artists are presenting a series of “paintings” that were put aside in their studio throughout the years for not being convincing enough but nevertheless having material value. Recently, the artists turned back to those works with a desire to revise them in order to achieve better versions. Not working for an actual exhibition gave them the freedom of not needing a result. No need to succeed was very liberating: they would work outside, in front of the studio, on the floor, putting them aside to dry and look at them another day and decide whether or not to keep working on them. By interfering in try-outs and rejected works digitally and materially, their artistic practice is in constant motion and revision. To repeat, to alter, to modify, to layer, to transfer: a shifting interaction that destabilises romantic notions of painting and responds to a society where reality is pictorially altered at all times.
Linus Bill + Adrien Horni’s practice is liberated from technical burdens and schematic behaviours. They work in a rather visceral way, without a clear result in mind. Laying on their studio floor, the works present themselves as canvases ready to be altered throughout an indefinite stretch of time. There is no rush, precision and satisfaction do not come hastened, just like an artistic practice as a duo requires a suiting pace for conversation, (dis)agreement, and cross-pollination. That is not to say their practice is left to randomness. In reality, the presence of chance in their work is the result of a conscientious approach to replicate how in the digital world images are replicated, appropriated, deformed, and repurposed.
Interested in stripping bare the artistic and its traditional notions of originality, genius, and uniqueness, they create by multiplying images, in a most digitally common action of copy/paste, to afterwards merge them layer upon layer. Avoiding the art world’s diligent formula for creation - documentation - distribution, the artists approach their own process as their commissions to efficiently reproduce their own piece. The process of choosing and (re)making a painting requires a formula of action and reaction, of tossing the digital image to one another, of swapping works which to work on, to ultimately amalgamate all the interventions into a final result. Yet the work keeps on living, ready to be given another look, to be transformed yet again.
Both born in 1982, one in Geneva (CH) and the other in Jegenstorf (CH), Adrien Horni and Linus Bill live and work in Biel, Switzerland. Linus Bill + Adrien Horni were the winners of the Swiss Art Award in 2013. Recent presentations of their work include La fine ligne. Kunsthalle Saint Gallen, Saint Gallen, CH (2020), Un été indien. FRAC Normandie-Caen, Caen, FR (2020), Cantonale Berne Jura. La Nef, Le Noirmont, CH (2019), Linus Bill + Adrien Horni. La Salle de Bains, Lyon, FR (2018), Das Glied. ACRUSH, Zurich, CH (2018).
