Felix Schneeweiß - Best Boy

Felix Schneeweiß Best Boy

One simply must experience a feeling oneself in order to
understand it. The best comparison may be to the work of a
chef. The chef, too, can only add a dish to the menu once he
has tasted it himself. Otherwise it does not work. Impossible,
or else the dish would have no soul.
The situations Felix Schneeweiß produces in the exhibition
space of cubus-m, call to mind the ambience of a teenager’s
bedroom or a schoolroom. Somehow the scent is reminiscent
of gym class and of ink - even if no one is writing by hand or
if the sport jersey has come fresh from the dry cleaners
(...isn't always a bowl of cherries, 2014). The air is thick with
the artist’s subjectivity, his network, his past, his personal
memories and relationships. The mood is not exuberant, but
just the opposite – almost everything bespeaks finality and
leave-taking, and not without nostalgia. The emotions of the
reading and viewing audience are orchestrated and
composed, becoming erratic like those of a teenager. Happy
(2013) elicits tears, as if one already understood that the
most beautiful moment, the best time, had just gone by (or
passed again immediately). With his purposely-placed traces,
Schneeweiß makes the viewer aware of every step: thus,
Schneeweiß is able to delay the fading of an emotion, a
person or an experience from consciousness for just a
moment longer.
Titles can become admission tickets for outsiders. Often
illogical or intentionally paradoxical in their effect, through
interplay with the everyday objects on display titles open
interstitial spaces, which can be filled with individual feelings.
Thus the works on display oscillate between recapitulation
and (artistic) self-positioning. Schneeweiß places his own
identity and his name in a genealogy with art icons from his
personal hit and wish list of classmates in the form of ten
blank composition books, lined up on a shelf, each titled
simply with the first and abbreviated last name of its
supposed owner (Die Klasse von eben, 2013). The companion
piece Die Klasse von morgen (2013/2014), full of promise,
arouses empathy, yet little hope: photographs of five - close
to very close - friends of the artist who have been
photographed independently of one another in a photo booth
with tear-stained faces. The five images are assembled
together in a single frame. Adjacent, swept up confetti left
over from a missed festivity now creates an obstacle that
compels reflection with every step. Small format,
consecutively numbered drawings, hung as a frieze, articulate
the non-verbal expression of the artist between his object
findings. A wreath covered in bitumen and adorned with a
dark, unpersonalized bow, becomes a commemorative symbol
and, so, an unspecified token of love (This is why I love you,
2014). Elsewhere, in an edition of 100 vinyl records, each
including a masked self-portrait of the artist in poster format,
Schneeweiß repeats the sentence, “Please remember me,
please.” The phrase is preceded and followed by a buzzing
noise, synchronous with one’s expectation of rising and falling
sound: the endless end of the perpetuating recording (Bitte,
2013). Finally a good-bye kiss left behind on a gallery window
marks the (spatial) threshold between public and private,
between personal touch and gesture, and is, as well, a
commonly understood, or rather, translatable symbol that
conjures absence and triggers memory for all but the
unkissed (public affairs, 2014).
Perhaps some of the poetry of these works is preserved in
everyday life, when a swept-up pile of debris from a party, a
notebook rediscovered by chance, a memento or a piece of
clothing describe a longing: that things were somehow better
“back then” than today and, yet, in actuality were never as
good as they seem looking back.
Julia Müller