Aljoscha Tschaidse at Galerie Falk Losniza

Galerie Falk Losniza is delighted to present Bruges, a solo exhibition by Aljoscha Tschaidse in the gallery’s ground-floor exhibition space. The show features a new body of thirteen paintings and marks Tschaidse’s first solo presentation in Switzerland.

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Reid would eat a gummy and listen to Blixa Bargeld smoke a cigarette then drill a hole through the floor of the ICA, instead of going to first period. It was standard practice for him to spend his limited time left at school this way, indulgently, across town in the electronics superstore, exactly 1,001 steps from where Sten dropped him off. It was, he would say to his friends during break, an expression of his devotion. All the items cited in their laminated notebooks he would find futile, whereas he would think his mornings with Blixa were of some value to him. By the time he felt the effects of his gummy, he would be fantasising about the thought of something that would change his life forever.

This was the beginning of a story about fandom. Fandom that faintly remembers the object of its obsession, before all its memories dissolve into a blurry mess. This is true of Aljoscha’s and mine, that they started out looking alike and ended very differently.

When Aljoscha showed me the paintings for Bruges, he had a couple issues to discuss. Some of the tickets sounded hard, so we decided we would start with the title. The solution was a straightforward one. With an issue like this, he could let me mess around until, without having meant it, I could pick some
options out of the text.

We were right about the other ones. First the Mickey and Colin symbols began to explode, then an ossuary of skulls descended upon the building and the studio read Miss Havisham: the wintry branches of a chandelier looked like they were covered in frost, a word Aljoscha would have used as a pejorative when he read my first draft. His images were so chequered as to seem capricious, like he made all his choices with the television on. I’m losing my mind, I told him. As far as I knew, the marriage had failed or never existed.

All finished, he said to me, having stared at Big Foot for longer than anyone else on earth.

Oh. Already? Okay.

I was listening but also flipping through the images I’d taken on my phone, eventually thinking, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I had no idea, but then I shouldn’t have let my mind roam too far from my eyes. Not least because Aljoscha has been able to empty a large part of himself into his images. Or so I’m starting to suspect. His Frankenstein’d Mouse, landscapes, bodily permutations, and starry nights sew together and apart the seams of his impulse to do more than just consume. Aljoscha stood up and padded across the room. I could see him fluffing up a salad, adding the beetroot, by all appearances, totally at ease.

In my defence, I only thought of you.

I’m just going to throw in a few things to like, zhoosh it up, he told me.

This whole time, he’d been spinning “a fucking fairytale.” (Ray in In Bruges)

Written by Robert Frost