Happily Aging & Daying

HAPPILY AGING & DYING A cavalcade of knights rise up from the smoke of cigarettes. There is like a smell of sand, of dunes’ dust. The landscape is veiled, in the distance, one can hardly distinguish the presence of a city. The characters painted by Noemi Pfister seem to live in a shared semi-reality, a synesthetic world in which plants have faces and colors have memories. Although one is tempted to read her paintings as a perfect dystopia, a premonitory vision of the earth after a hundred years of necro-capitalism, Noemi Pfister rather suggests the apocalypse as a form of liberation, perhaps even leading to a resolution. In this world, the universe is populated by new endemic species, half-beastly, half-childlike, and genuinely unable to decide what to do with their lives. These characters, very busy hanging out, notice the state of the world, escape from it and end up representing a form of living and feral hope. Noemi Pfister’s paintings thus speak of a tiny gesture, a step aside, the exact moment when one chooses what to do and where to go - or the moment when one chooses not to do, not to go. With her paintings, she proposes other ways of living together, within chosen communities that are composed without hierarchies. Her characters are survivors, and for this reason, they are everything that heroes are not. Immutably adolescent, in a gang and apart, they smoke and look at this world, peacefully. OPENING : 01ST DECEMBER 22 EXHIBITION OPEN UNTIL 14TH JANUARY 23 Happily Aging & Dying is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Geneva and consists exclusively of new paintings produced for the occasion. The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Geneva- based author Lucas Cantori, written in conversation with Noemi Pfister’s practice.