Fabian Marti

From Recording to Constructed Images

Marti was born in Fribourg in 1979 and studied in the photography department at HGKZ in Zurich from 2002 to 2006.^*1 Around this period he made analog snapshots of friends and his immediate surroundings, then gradually shifted toward constructing images as the recording of familiar environments no longer sustained his work. A Pro Helvetia essay notes that the photography program drew little distinction between fine-art and applied photography, requiring students to define their own positions, and traces Marti’s move from snapshots toward collage and the scanner.^*12

In the early exhibition Ape, Mom, I, portraits of friends, scanned images, and fired ceramic ape skulls appeared together. Materials from Galerie Peter Kilchmann describe the combination of analog photography and the scanner, and the way darkness and dust contribute to the images’ tactile quality.^*7 By this point, photography had become a central process for altering existing images and objects and transforming them into something else, extending beyond the faithful recording of his surroundings.

Connecting Photography, Ceramics, and Sculpture

Marti does not treat photography, sculpture, and ceramics as separate activities. Kunsthaus Biel discusses photograms, ceramics, wallpaper, and exchanges of works with other artists within the same body of work, identifying craft and mass production, creativity and authorship as shared concerns.^*4 In the photographs, reproducible images carry singular traces: scratches on a negative, dust on the scanning surface, or accidental effects of darkroom exposure. Marti treats this coexistence of repeatability and one-time physical marks as a condition shared with ceramics and installation.

At Kunstmuseum Luzern, large photograms, video, and objects were assembled within a single space, emphasizing handwork and tactility.^*5 By placing light-made surfaces alongside ceramics and architectural supports, he refused to limit photography to a single framed image on the wall and underscored that reproduced images also bear traces of the hand and physical scale. The continuity of the work lies in the materials through which an image passes, across objects classified as photography or sculpture.

Using the Scanner as a Camera

In an interview with Flash Art, Marti explains that he used the scanner as a camera, scratching negatives, drawing on them, adding tiny collages, and enlarging the results.^*2 With a scanner, the distance between object and glass is almost zero, so dust, scratches, and the contact surface itself enter the image. Fotomuseum Winterthur likewise identifies scanned images, photograms, and image processing as central to Marti’s photographic work.^*11

His use of the scanner works against the tendency of digital processing to remove noise, leaving dust and scratches from the contact surface in the image. Enlarging marks that would normally be erased turns the image from a smooth carrier of information into a record of contact between machine and object. An artTV presentation of his Coalmine exhibition describes the open scanner as producing deep black and functioning almost like a “digital photogram,” with the apparatus itself generating the image.^*19

Connecting Digital Processes and the Darkroom

After exhausting the possibilities of the scanner, Marti moved toward photograms. In an interview with ATP Diary, he explains his interest in bringing digital and analog processes into one workflow by placing computer-generated material onto photographic paper and using an old technique for contemporary work.^*15 At Parc Saint Léger, he built a darkroom inside the exhibition space and incorporated the place of production into the installation.^*3

Marti uses the photogram as a contemporary working process rather than as a nostalgic “return to analog.” Digitally designed forms encounter light and material in the darkroom, introducing a process that cannot produce exactly the same result each time. Swiss Re’s collection text likewise emphasizes the combination of handwork and contemporary reproduction technologies and the inclusion of a deliberate loss of control within the work.^*18 Digital and analog function as successive stages through which one image moves back and forth.

Keeping Scratches, Dust, and Chance

Marti retains chance as part of the work. Scratches, dust, variations in exposure, and distortions caused by firing ceramics leave results that the artist cannot fully predetermine. Kunstverein Braunschweig describes multiple exposure, inversion, appropriation, and photograms as processes through which images become connected to time and collective memory.^*1 Swiss Re notes a connection with Surrealist photograms and argues that loosening control allows unexpected results and the unconscious to enter the work.^*18

This approach limits the degree to which digital tools make every element conform to intention. Marti has said that he realized many digital effects have precedents in darkroom techniques and began mixing the two.^*2 In the same interview, he describes allowing chance into the process so that the work does not merely repeat images he already knows.^*20

Mysticism and Science Fiction

The recurring skulls, crosses, spirals, crystals, eggs, masks, science-fiction book covers, and hallucinogenic plants function as recognizable symbols whose established meanings can be redirected. In a 2009 interview with Mousse, Marti explains that he uses old and widely recognizable “archetypes” because he understands knowledge of the past as something inscribed in human beings through sensation and feeling as much as through rational knowledge.^*20 Because these symbols already arrive with meaning, inversion, repetition, and combination can create moments in which that meaning turns in another direction. Marti says he uses the expectation that a sign carries a fixed meaning and aims for the point at which it flips toward its opposite.^*20

In the Flash Art interview, Marti explains his use of African masks bought online through several associations at once: their reception by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, their ritual and mystical implications, and their relationship to portraiture.^*2 Parc Saint Léger likewise connects the avant-garde traditions Marti references to histories in which art approached science, literature, and psychology in order to investigate perception and the unconscious, citing figures and movements ranging from Orphism to Wallace Berman and Terence McKenna.^*3 This treatment of masks belongs to Marti’s broader use of familiar images as signs whose established meanings can be reversed.^*20 Skulls, crosses, swords, crystals, and masks recur because their immediate recognizability gives that reversal something to work against.

In Mousse, Marti says that he uses art-historical and historical archives as “collective memory”.^*20 Magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, pulp science fiction from the 1970s and 1980s, religious imagery, and ethnographic images are reworked as cultural memories already in circulation, with their original explanatory contexts left behind. In the same conversation, he describes lines and tape added to appropriated images not as “distortion,” but as abstract layers that multiply possible readings of the image.^*20

Early Work and Appropriated Images

In the 2007 exhibition Ape, Mom, I, early photographs, scanned images, and ceramic ape skulls appeared together, making his expansion from photographic images toward objects explicit.^*7 In Kaleidoscope from the same period, Marti altered old science-fiction book covers and rescanned them while obscuring titles and original meanings. Collection Pictet describes this operation as opening obsolete imagery to new possibilities of meaning.^*16

Heroic Dose

Heroic Dose (2011) is a greenhouse-like installation combining glass, iron, ceramic pots, and hallucinogenic plants. Migros Museum describes it as a work in which New Age culture since the 1960s collides with the forms of modernism.^*6 Even as the work expands into materials beyond photography, the method of placing familiar cultural signs into new combinations continues.

Venice and the Photogram

In 2011, Marti participated in the 54th Venice Biennale, ILLUMInations. La Biennale’s historical archive records his participation.^*9 He continued to expand large photograms into exhibition space; at Kunstmuseum Luzern, wall-filling images made with light were combined with ceramics and video.^*5 A major development of this period was the extension of photography into the scale of the exhibition environment instead of treating it as a finished image contained within a frame.

Marti Collection and the Artist Book

In Marti Collection (2013), Marti exhibited works acquired through exchanges with other artists, disrupting the convention that a solo exhibition should consist only of new work by the named artist. Kunsthaus Biel places nonmonetary networks of exchange and questions of creativity and authorship at the center of the exhibition.^*4 The 2016 publication Fabian Marti. Bilder 2005–2016 brings together more than a decade of photographic work, editing photograms and inkjet prints through technical and formal relationships. The Swiss Federal Office of Culture publication record likewise notes the organization of photograms and inkjet prints through formal relationships.^*8

The History of the Photogram

Marti’s photograms have technical precedents in the camera-less photographs made in the 1920s by Man Ray andLászló Moholy-Nagy. Guggenheim Bilbao, in an exhibition devoted to “new ways of seeing” since the twentieth century, connects contemporary work to a lineage of light, abstraction, and technical experimentation.^*13 Marti’s materials, however, include computer-generated forms, scanned images, and appropriated science-fiction and religious imagery, preventing the photogram from becoming a simple reenactment of a historical technique. His description in ATP Diary of “making contemporary work with an old technique” states this distance succinctly.^*15

Appropriation and Authorship

Another critical axis in Marti’s work is authorship: what it means to call an image “one’s own.” As the Pro Helvetia essay title “The Curse and the Power of Appropriation” suggests, his work is bound up with borrowing, damaging, and reproducing existing images and destabilizing the meanings attached to their sources.^*12 Galerie Peter Kilchmann’s artist materials likewise describe an ongoing inquiry into creativity and the role of the author through photocopiers, scanners, and preexisting images.^*17 All is All (2014) placed photograms, sculpture, and wall works within the same exhibition, making explicit the combination of handwork and mechanical reproduction.^*14

In Marti Collection, questions of authorship expanded from image manipulation to the ownership and exchange of artworks. Instead of forming a conventional collection by purchasing works by other artists, Marti included within the exhibition the relationships created through exchanging works.^*4 Appropriation therefore connects the technique of altering a source image to institutional questions about who makes, owns, and assigns value to an artwork.

Photography and Ceramics

Photography and ceramics share material results that cannot be determined by intention alone. Dust, scratches, and variations in exposure remain in photographs; pressure from the hand and distortion through firing remain in ceramics. Kunstmuseum Luzern placed monumental photograms and handmade objects in the same space as questions of human scale and tactility.^*5 The works are connected by the retention of chance and material traces across different media.

In an environment where digital images have been reproduced ever more smoothly since the 2000s, Marti increases scratches and dust as he uses machines and brings computer-generated material into older darkroom techniques. A Frieze review likewise discusses the coexistence of photography, sculpture, appropriation, and mystical signs within a single exhibition.^*10 His position is defined by movement between digital and analog processes and by retaining the points where an image comes into contact with matter.