Peter Wächtler

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While it might seem foreign or unfamiliar, underwater life, bourgeois domesticity, or the world of animated cartoons are simply habitats, each one coming with a set of behaviours, life-forms, movements, objects, images, and relationships. What is a disaster in one is a miracle in another and nothing more than routine in another. Dislocating them or mixing them together short-circuits their logic.

To witness a battle between a crab and other sea animals, for example, is to experience a fantasy, a nightmare, and an everyday occurrence—all at the same time.

To a butler, acts of intimacy, hospitality, corruption, lust, kindness, desperation, generosity, jealousy, hypocrisy, or delinquency are all the same in the end—it’s all just administration. Or, in an animated cartoon, deadpan humour can be laced with depression and pathos, and used totell stories of heart-broken rats or hobos.

Peter Wächtler’s (b 1979, Germany) lives in Brussels. His recent solo exhibitions include Senator!?, dépendance, Brussels, 2013; Springtime, Kunstverein Hildesheim, 2013; B.A.C.K, Ludlow 38, New York, 2013; Salon Of Fear, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2013; Das Kino im Alten Mühlenviertel, Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin, 2012; The Set, Etablissement d’en Face, Brussels, 2011. His work has been included in group exhibitions such as, Meanwhile…Suddenly and Then, Lyon Biennale, 2013; Un-Scene II, Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels, 2012; Melanchotopia, Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2011. Wächtler is a member of Etablissement d’en Face and a co-founder, with Hans-Christian Lotz, of the exhibition space Sotoso in Brussels.