Beat Streuli

Born in 1957, in Switzerland, Beat Streuli lives and works in Brussels. He is internationally reconised for is street portraits, documenting anonymous street dwellers or “flaneurs” in cities from all around the world. Seemingly freezing the flow of stressing their facial expression in order to lend them a strong sense of individuality with which the viewer can identify and play on shared experiences.

Beat Streuli exhibits in international art is prestigious collections. He develops large installations for public space by integrating new technologies.

Since the 1990s, every shot taken by the artist Beat Streuli, while founded in a solid
conceptual framework, inevitably invites us to plunge into the spontaneous movement of
daily life in the city. Immersed abruptly in this mass, we come face to face with the huge
photographs and monumental installations created by Beat Streuli as if confronted with
some figure or detail of urban life. We are transported by these portraits, picked out from
the crowd on vast surfaces. Often, the face becomes an absorbing and reflecting canvas,
blending the personality of the subject with that of the observer. It then becomes what
philosopher and critic Françoise Gaillard calls a sort of interface, a medium which directly
compels the attention and in which the gaze is constructed in the interaction of artist and
spectator.

These photographs also bear witness to the artist’s awareness of the places he
appropriates here: Moscow, Dubai, Hong Kong and, in earlier videos, also London and
New York, the five cities where Arendt & Medernach has an international presence.

Here and there through the mural and the videos we glimpse the contradictions and
tension of these cities, in particular in recent events such as the “Umbrella Revolution”,
the weekly sit-in by Philippino housewives, and the police presence in Hong Kong; the
Victory Day military parade in Moscow, a demonstration of power by a Putin who is still at
the heart of internal and external conflicts in Moscow; or, again, the portraits of Indian and
Pakistani seasonal workers contrasting with the phantasmagorical world of Dubai.

By juxtaposing faces and surfaces, portraits and texts, Beat Streuli succeeds in using
his complex medium (wallpaper and small and large superimposed photographs, along
with the videos) to create an adversarial blend of symbiosis and distancing, particular and
general, that alternates with the gaze. This approach, which allows spectators to both
engage with and remain distant from this set of evocative images, presents the living and
the built-up environment of cities with an objectivity which goes beyond the moment.
Aesthetically sophisticated photographs mainly focusing on the individual are combined
with images of built components whose details tend towards the abstract. A visual
game of overlay and interpenetration, of what can be glimpsed and what can be seen,
ceaselessly demands the viewer’s attention.

The permanent installation at Arendt House, on the auditorium’s windows, displays a
complex composition of images from Dubai, Moscow and Hong Kong as well, in which
people and abstract elements combine with Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and Latin texts.
Through their transparency and layers, these images originating from the new financial
centres situated astride East and West, between Europe and Asia, blend with the flow of
Luxembourg traffic and passers-by.

As in all of Beat Streuli’s work, we are confronted with the similarities and differences of
urban settings in a globalised world widely assumed to be increasingly stereotypical and
similar. Only a deeper reading reveals the particularities of individual cities, their “inevitable
specificity”. The force of these photographs and videos lies in the meaning they lend to
details, to the capture of the significant fragment that might hold a key to the essence of
beings and things. Similarly, the balance created by the artist between the sensible and
the intelligible guides the viewer, unveiling a way to construe the images that draws on the
different strata of the medium.

(Source : Paul di Felice)