The MACT/CACT has been striving since 1994 to expand on the work of the Swiss artist Martin Disler (1949-1996), who held his – albeit belated – début in Canton Ticino here in our premises, an event that actually marked the birth of the MACT/CACT in Switzerland.

This time, with an exhibition that closes the 2024 season and commemorates the 30 years of the MACT/CACT’s existence, we have decided to present a selection of works on paper – drawings and the occasional monotype – made between the late seventies and 1995, the year before the artist passed away.

A leading activist on the neo-Expressionist scene that arose towards the end of the seventies as a counterbalance to conceptual and minimalist art, Disler nevertheless always carved out a very personal, almost unique space within one of the last twentieth-century collectives, where aggregate activism truly marked the passing of a millennium and of many a Utopian ideology.

The Swiss artist managed to keep faith with his professional, artistic and existential authenticity until the day he died, digging with renewed impetus – at the beginning of the nineties – at the very point in time when the old century was coming to an end, mutating into the new one that was about to begin. His last work and the idiom he employed were triggered increasingly by the styles that held sway at the time and by the ferment of community that had marked the two previous decades. Once the eighties had drawn to a close, we find the Swiss artist continuing to pursue his new adventure, which was only interrupted by his untimely death in 1996.

A faithful existentialist, atheist and just, a realist and in no respect a pietist, but noticeably and sincerely sensitive to the disasters of mankind, Martin Disler interpreted and redrew the neuroses of a long-awaited change of era, balanced on a knife-edge between the confusion that reigned in a society orphan of a world that had ceased to be and the uncertainty that characterised the first two decades of the new millennium, torn between social cannibalism and digital solitude.

Making your way through the exhibition, which in point of fact presents works on paper created from the late seventies to 1995, there is a clear perception of the transition from an aggressive era to a more symbolist, reflective phase, since the fall of the Berlin Wall unquestionably made its mark on that moment of adaptation and evolutionary confusion that was not only geopolitical and economic, but also one of social uncertainty.

With great sensitivity and intimate suffering, Disler drew attention to this moment when confusion reigned and identities were fragile.

Mario Casanova, Bellinzona, 2024.
Translation from Italian by Pete Kercher

Martin Disler (1949-1996), Untitled, 1987. Fat graphite on paper, signed and dated lower right, 36 x 51 cm. Private collection, Switzerland.