Jérôme Zonder. The Dancing Room

As recently as 2016, Jérôme Zonder was invited by Museum Tinguely to create a room of his own as part of its thematic show ‘PRIÈRE DE TOUCHER – The Touch of Art’. He responded with a series of drawings of hands clutching each other as well as the large-format, four-part female nude called Autopsie de la jeune fille of 2015. Here, the sensuous perceptual impulse that informs nude drawing and that was replicated on the support as graphic tactile energy extended even to the walls, which Zonder covered in an all-over of graphite fingerprints.

Zonder’s solo show at Museum Tinguely in the summer of 2017 will take its cues from a major late work of Tinguely himself, his Mengele-Totentanz (1986), a fourteen-part mechanical sculpture that is to be re-installed in a specially built, chapel-like room inside the museum. It owes its name to the ‘high altar’ in the middle: a maize harvester – so drastically deformed as to be barely recognisable – made by the firm of Mengele, the family of the notorious Nazi concentration camp doctor. All the parts used for this work are relics of an infernal blaze at a farm not far from Tinguely’s studio in Neyruz, near Fribourg. The theme of the Dance of Death has a long tradition in Basel. It reached its apogee in the famous Basel Dance of Death of 1450, a widely cited and reproduced mural painted on the inside of the wall enclosing what was then the Dominican convent. Its row of dancers conveyed several messages at once: it reminded viewers of the transience of life and the egalitarian nature of death, but at the same time took up some of the ideas behind the Humanist ideals then emerging.

Applying a maximum-precision graphic method, he demonstrates his command of every technique, combining charcoal, pencil, and graphite on diverse supports and exploiting to the full every possible nuance between black and white. This enables him to unite on a single sheet a broad range of styles extending from (hyper)realism to pointillist finger-drawing, from disegno to childlike scribbling and cartoons. Drawing, understood in the classical sense, is that means of expression whose intimacy puts it on a par with writing, which is also what lends it to the unmediated visualisation of conceptual processes, cognitive reflections, or an associative automatism. A young generation of draughtsmen, to which Zonder himself belongs, is now taking this process beyond the confines of the single support. Since many works make an impact when grouped in thematic and stylistic collages, Zonder combines single drawings to create wall-filling assemblages. These can grow into quasi-architectural spaces which, being inseparably linked to places of remembrance and reflection, appeal to body and mind, with all the senses.

The topical urgency of Zonder’s drawings is most glaringly apparent in the execution scenes camouflaged as jeux d’enfants – grotesque, nightmarish collages in the manner of Otto Dix or George Grosz that start with familiar situations, the playroom in the private home for example, only to confront viewers all the more forcefully with scenes of horrific violence. Others, such as the series Les chairs grises (2013), rest on documentary photographs of the atrocities committed inside Nazi concentration camps, but instead of merely reproducing them in another medium, he reworks them as a trail of fingerprints so that the drawing itself becomes expressive of our sense that some things are simply beyond our comprehension.